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| Tutorial | Discussion | New page feed | Reviewers | Curation tool Suggestions | Coordination |
 | This page is a reference and tutorial for reviewing new articles. It is essential reading for users interested in joining theNew Page Reviewer group. |
Reading time: approx. 34 minutes
New pages patrol (NPP) is agroup of Wikipedians who check whether new articles, redirects and other pages conform to Wikipedia'score content policies. The purpose of patrolling new pages is equally to identify pages which cannot meet this standard, and therefore should bedeleted, and tosupport the improvement of those that can. Pages that pass New Pages Patrol don't have to be perfect, but they must be appropriate for an encyclopedia and suitable for inclusion.
All new articles and redirects are patrolled, unless the user that created them had theautopatrolled permission. NPP's first priority is to identify pages with serious content problems—includingattack pages,copyright violations, andvandalism—and mark them underspeedy deletion criteria. Beyond that, patrollers consider whether articles are suitable for inclusion in their current state according to the relevant policies and guidelines. Articles considered unsuitable are nominated for deletion or,in certain circumstances, moved to thedraft namespace for improvement. Articles considered suitable for inclusion are marked as 'reviewed', with anotification sent to the user that created it. Reviewers may also flag issues with reviewed pages withmaintenance tags, perform basic copyediting, and/or sort the article into relevant categories,stubs, andWikiProjects. Until they are passed as patrolled, New Pages are notindexed by external search engines and will not appear in search results.
NPP is done by experienced users with theNew Page Reviewer permission, many of whom have graduated through theNPP School, and byadministrators. New Page Reviewers are expected to have a very good knowledge of Wikipedia'scontent policies, prior experience with itsprocesses for handling articles, and good communication skills. They primarily use thenew pages feed andpage curation tool for patrolling.
There are currently879 users with the new page reviewer permission and a total of 1,701 New Page Patrollers (including administrators). Aside from the technical ability to mark pages as reviewed, New Page Patrollers do not have any special decision-making powers over new articles. They are expected to work carefully andassume good faith, paying particular attention totreating newcomers with kindness and patience. Disputes over new page patrolling should be resolved using thedispute resolution process.
This page is the tutorial. It contains the guidelines and resources for using the reviewing system. Discussions related to new page patrolling and further help take place primarily at thetalk page for reviewers.
The most important feature of NPP is the Curation Tool interface and itsspecial set of instructions for use. The tool is linked by a 'Review' button that appears on all pages in theNewPagesFeed. It contains the actual button to mark a page as reviewed. It also contains an information summary about the page and its creator, tools for tagging articles with maintenance tags, and a tool to send comments to editors who have worked on the article. A copyright violation detector can be added to the toolbar withthis user script. There are many other useful tools available to make doing NPP easier. You can find many of them on theresources page or linked throughout this page.
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Special:NewPagesFeed is the central motor for reviewing new pages and drafts. It logs new pages immediately after the first version is saved. While it is a good idea to reduce the backlog of unreviewed pages by working from the back of the list, it is nevertheless important that serious breaches of policy such as spam and attack pages be deleted very quickly. A comprehensive preferences panel lets you select what kind of new pages you want to review. The system remembers your preferences each time you open the feed. A list daily created by a bot atsorted list classifies all unreviewed articles by topic, along with a short excerpt of the article. Use this list if you prefer to work on articles in your own sphere of knowledge. A system calledORES inserts alerts of possible problems with the article. Other meta information will easily help you identify if the article creator is a beginner.
This useful script conveniently adds a "Page Curation" link to your top toolbar that loads theNewPagesFeed.
It is often helpful to review the oldest pages in the NPP queue, rather than the newest, as these may have even been indexed by search engines. When reviewing from the back of the queue, you may come across pages that were created long ago but that recently were changed from being a redirect to an article (or vice versa). These articles pose a distinct challenge, as they are often the result ofedit wars, other forms of tendentious editing, or paid editing and spam. Patrolling the "oldest" articles in the NPP feed has its ownsets of questions and procedures that complement standard NPP workflows.
Reviewingmainspace articles is the primary purpose of new pages patrol and should be prioritized over other namespaces. Although new articles appear in the new pages feed immediately, take care not to alienate article creators (especially new editors) by patrolling them while they are still in progress. Unless there areserious content problems,wait at least an hour before nominating an article for deletion,blank-and-redirecting (BLAR) it, or moving it to draftspace. A creation date warning appears on each article in the feed that is less than one hour old.
If the page is not a candidate for a deletion process, but has other issues, there is rarely any need to rush. Inform the creator of any problems using maintenance tags, the article talk page, or the message feature of the curation tool and give them time to address them (perhaps several days) before taking further action. If improvements are not forthcoming, itmay be appropriate to move the article to draftspace, to give the creator more space to work on it. However, it is important to remember that 'draftifying' is not a substitute to the deletion process, nor a catch-all solution for articles you don't know what to do with.
If you tag an article written by a newcomer, consider leaving a friendly note on their talk page, pointing them toHelp:Maintenance template removal (WP:MTR), which is dedicated to explaining the process of addressing and removing maintenance tags and including that anyone can remove them (except for AFD and CSD tags) after the problems have been addressed (or if they were truly added in error). Most new editors don't know that they are permitted to do this.
Reviewers should make use of Page Curation tool to post short messages to the creator, provide informative edit summaries, and otherwise appropriately engage with other editors. It is essential that good faith new creators be encouraged to continue creating articles and editing Wikipedia.
It is not in the scope of NPP to mentor new users or complete their articles, but reviewers may wish to direct new users to theTeahouse question forum,help desk andArticles for Creation for assistance.Wikipedia:Your first article,Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia, theWikipedia:Tutorial,The Wikipedia Adventure, and other help pages are also available. When drafts are approved atAfCLink and moved to the mainspace they will be checked again by new page patrollers in many instances.
Briefly, to review an article:
The rest of this section summarises in rough order of priority the issues you will identify and what to do. Step 5 is optional – if you don't know what to do with an article, leave it to another reviewer, add it to your watch list and see what they do with it.
Three types of serious content problems require immediately response: attack pages, copyright violations, and vandalism. You do not have to wait the usual hour before acting to remove these kind of problems. When you tag something for speedy deletion, do not mark it as reviewed. All speedy deletion tags are available in the Curation Tool - there is no need to add the tags manually. Admins are usually quick to respond.
Thecriteria for speedy deletion (CSD) specify when an article can be immediately deleted without discussion. It is intended to reduce the time spent on deletion discussions for pages or media withno practical chance of surviving one. New page reviewers should be familiar with all the speedy deletion criteria, but the most commonly encountered are:
You can nominate an article for speedy deletion with the{{db}} series of templates through the Curation Tool; there is a specific tag for each criterion.A patrolling administrator will then either delete the page ordecline the nomination by removing the tag.Any editor other than the creator of the article may also remove the tag, which should be taken as a sign that the deletion is controversial and thatanother deletion process should be used.If the article creator removes the tag, you can restore it and use {{subst:uw-speedy1}} to warn them on their talk page.Do not mark pages as reviewed after you tag them for speedy deletion. If the nomination is declined, or the creator removes the tag, it will need to be reviewed again.
Always consideralternatives to deletion before nominating an article for speedy deletion. Check the history for a better version; a page is eligible for speedy deletion only if all of its history is also eligible. Consider whether it could bestubbed,merged, orBLAR and redirected instead. Speedy deletion must be completelyuncontroversial and used in only the most obvious cases. If a page has survived a deletion discussion in the past, it usually cannot be speedily deleted.
| Notability |
|---|
| General notability guideline |
| Subject-specific guidelines |
| See also |
The core purpose of NPP is to check if an article is suitable and appropriate for inclusion. Unless an article falls underwhat Wikipedia is not or a speedy deletion criterion, notability is the key test of determining whether or not it can exist in all but the most clear-cut examples of unwanted content. Assessing notability can be very time-consuming, requiring aproactive search for and evaluation of sourcing, subject-specific knowledge, and ultimately is only decided one way or another via a consensus at AfD.
Wikipedia's notability guidelines are complex, frequently subjective, and are often updated and adapted to new situations. New Page Patrollers should be familiar with the corenotability guideline, especially thegeneral notability guidelines (GNGs), and at least some of the more importantsubject-specific notability guidelines (SNGs). However, few if any editors can claim to have a comprehensive knowledge of every notability guideline, so it is important to tread carefully and be aware of what you don't know.At a minimum, you should be able to identify topics that patently lack notability and nominate them for deletion. You may also opt to investigate the notability of topics in more depth, but bear in mind that a fullBEFORE-style search is only really necessary for AfD nominations. Assessment of articles in topic areas with highly detailed SNGs is best left to reviewers familiar with those areas and guidelines. The{{notability}} maintenance tag (and its more specialised subtemplates) can be used to mark articles on topics of uncertain notability for review by others.
All candidates for theNPP user right are aware of the importance of sources, especially forBiographies of living persons (BLP). However, with the exponential growth in private websites, blogs, and AI (LLMs), not all references arereliable sources and the ones that are used for notability are often little more than fleeting mentions, a name on a team list, an employee card, an interview, or comments on social media. Somefail verification or are already completely dead links, others may be made up by AI (halucinations). Notability sources must be an in-depth treatment. Other sources that verify other claims must also be reliable and not interviews. Short articles that have many sources are designed to make the article look more notable than it is. In the case of BLP that have no sources at all but whichcould be notable, they should be moved to draft withthis script.
You must considerthe alternatives before nominating any article for deletion. First and foremost, if you canfix the issues yourself, do so, or use maintenance tags to bring the article to attention of someone who can. Otherwise, there are alternatives to wholesale deletion that retain some or all of the article's content:
A good option for articles that are clearly not ready for mainspace, but could be given further time for improvement, such as: an article with no sources,[1] an obvious machine translation, very poor English, and obvious conflict of interest or undisclosed paid editing. Please review the official draftification criteria atWikipedia:Drafts#Reasons to move an article to draftspace; add theMoveToDraft script to your .js prefs; it is designed for NPP for this purpose. Articles older than 90 days should not be draftified. An article should never be draftified more than once, and should never bedraftified over objections. Draftspace is optional. If needed, send toAfD instead. To move an article to draft space yourself, you should:
Moving to draft does not necessarily increase the workload at AFC. When a draft is finally submitted to AfC, a lot of help might be forthcoming - which is not in the remit of NPP. NPP also has deadlines - AfC does not.
All of these actions may be carried outboldly, unless you think it will be controversial or if it is challenged by another editor. In that case, it should be proposed and discussed at AfD.
If an article is not suitable for inclusion, does not meet any of the speedy deletion criteria, and you have rejected alternative to deletion, it should be nominated for deletion. Most commonly, this is because the topic[2] of the article isnot notable, or violates the'NOT' policy. The options are:
In each case, to ensure the article is actually eligible for a deletion process it is important to follow these "before" steps first:
If the article is a cut-and-paste (all or part of) from Wikipedia article in anotrher language, which is often the case, it should be tagged with{{Db-a2}} (CSD A2). Do not tag articles written in another language withG1 patent nonsense, what looks to you like gibberish may well be a rare language - check it out in Google Translate, If an article is acopyright violation, it may be nominated for deletion criterionG12.
For other non-English articles, carefully follow the instructions atPages needing translation. Essentially, this consists of reading a machine translation the article (seecomparison of machine translation applications). If the translated content of the article does not violate a CSD criteion and is likely to be notable, you can place the{{Not English}} template, e.g., {{notenglish|Spanish}}, to flag it for translation. If the content of the article is not worth keeping due to lack of notability, please use the appropriate deletion process.
Check that the page title is appropriate and, if not,move it to corrected title. Be aware that there are general naming conventions (such as using sentence case for non-proper nouns, or not adding disambiguation terms in parentheses if they are not needed), and also topic-specificnaming conventions.
If you move an article and the former name is an implausible redirect (and you can'tsuppress the creation of a redirect following the move), you will need to request its deletion using{{Db-r3}}. If you cannot perform the move for technical reasons, ask for help atRequested moves. If the move is potentially controversial, follow the instructions at Requested moves.
Wikipedia's licensing allows editors tocopy material from one article to another and totranslate material from our sister projects in other language, providing that the original authors of the material are attributed. Copied material is therefore generally not a problem for NPPunless an entire article has been copied to a new title (a 'cut-and-paste move'), the copying has created acontent fork, or theproper attribution is not been maintained.
The attribution requirement is usually fulfilled by a statement in theedit summary that links to the original page (e.g.copied content frompage name; see that page's history for attribution). If you find an article that contains copied or translated material without attribution, you can add one in adummy edit. For further information, seeWikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia#Repairing insufficient attribution.
To aid reader navigation and make efficient use of editor resources, Wikipedia prohibits having multiple articles on the same or an extremely similar topic, which is known ascontent forking.
If you encounter a broad or popular topic that you are surprised didn't already have a page, there is a high chance that it has been forked. Authors sometimes also link to pages they have forked from the "see also" section. If the new page has content the existing page does not, nominate the pages formerging; otherwise, just convert the new page into aredirect.
Moving an article to correct or change its title is poorly understood by new editors. Finding they cannot change a typo in the title, or being unaware of redirects and wanting a topic found at another title, new users sometimes create new pages with the content of existing articles – 'cut-and-paste moves'. Doing so severs the edit history, required under copyright. In such situations, request deletion using{{Db-a10|article=Existing article title}} / {{Db-same|article=Existing article title}}. Though these templates have their own warnings, separately warn the user using{{subst:Uw-c&pmove}}. In the rare situation that the user has added significant content to the copy they posted that isworth merging, list the page for a history merge (note: not the same as a merge) atRequests for history merge.
Where an existing page or redirect has been used as the target of a cut-and-paste move the edit should be reversed, restoring the original page content.
If you come upon an article on a duplicate topic but that has aseparate origin (not copied from the existing article, addressed above), this also can be asked to be deleted under CSD A10. However, here, if the article has content that warrants merging, perform amerge (do not ask for a history merge) and redirect to the existing article. Be sure to provide mandatory copyright attribution when you do so. SeePROMERGE.
The following steps are often useful for improving new articles or bringing them to the attention of others who will. However, do not feel obligated to perform them.Wikipedia is a work in progress and your main responsibility as a new page patroller is to identify articles that definitely should not be included, not bring them up to a given standard.
Other details
If you find an unpatrolled redirect that is at RFD, or you send a redirect to RFD, mark it as reviewed.
Is somebody creating a lot of redirects, and you are finding zero problems with them? Consider posting an application for them at theredirect autopatrol list. They need around 100 redirects to qualify. Usextools (and select "only include redirects") to check number of redirects created.
If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people hijacking reviewed redirects to create unreviewed articles.
I'd say that on a typical day of patrolling the back end of the queue, I'll go through 150-300 [redirects], send 5-10 to RfD, tag around 5 with G5 or R3, and either retarget or convert-to-dab 5 more. Attack redirects are less frequent, I'll come across a handful of attack redirects per week. --Rosguill
Redirects from titles in languages other than English are allowed if there is a significant connection between the language in question and the target subject. Examples include non-English titles for creative works originally written in those languages such asCien años de soledad, or regional names for foods such askebapcinja. These are allowed even in alphabets other than Latin, such asМосква or日本. However, names for common objects that have no particular association with any culture despite global use (e.g.Bahnwagen, German forRailroad car) or even use with a sufficiently broad subset of countries (e.g.Bidé, Italian for bidet), are discouraged and generally deleted atRfD.
New page patrollers should focus their patrolling on mainspace articles and mainspace redirects. Patrolling other namespaces is discouraged due to the importance of patrolling mainspace (search engine indexing implications, most likely to contain BLP or copyright violations, etc.) and also the large backlog. Below are some checklists for patrolling other namespaces, kept for historical reasons:
Disambiguation pages are located in mainspace so will appear inSpecial:NewPagesFeed like a regular article. They are usually easier to review than a normal article. Here are some tips specific to disambiguation pages.
The draft namespace is managed by theArticles for Creation project. New drafts are not reviewed by NPP but the draft queue can be accessed from thenew pages feed. However, unless the user that moves them isautopatrolled, drafts moved to the article namespace enter the new pages feed and should be reviewed as normal. New page patrollers are automatically placed on the allow list for theArticles for Creation Helper Script gadget, in case they are ever interested in helping out at AFC. The AFC reviewing skillset is very similar to new page patrolling, but be sure to read AFC's tutorials to familiarize yourself with the differences.
The purpose of new pages patrol is to review thecontent of new pages, not theconduct of the editors who created them. Nevertheless, new page patrollers are well-placed to identify conduct issues such assockpuppetry,promotion,serial copyright violations,undisclosed paid editing and other conflicts of interest, andchild protection issues. It is always worth checking the history of pages for evidence of these issues.
New page patrollers are in a good position to spotconflict of interest (COI) editing, which includes people writing about themselves, their family, friends, clients, employers, or anything else they have a financial and or other close relationship with. Conflict of interest editing is strongly discouraged, but permitted within certain conditions, namely that a) the COI is disclosed and b) that editors with a COI avoid directly editing the article in question. For new articles, the latter requirement means that they should be created via theArticles for Creation process and accepted by a reviewer there. Editing with afinancial conflict of interest ('paid editing') is even more tightly regulated, with disclosuremandated by the Wikimedia Terms of Use and AfC mandated by local policy.
Some indicators of COI and LLM editing include:
If you suspect conflict of interest editing in a new article, the first thing to do is to check whether the creator hasproperly disclosed a COI (check both their user page, the article history, and the article talk page) and whether the article was accepted by an AfC reviewer. Then:
paid-en-wp@wikimedia.org, where afunctionary will review it and take appropriate further actionWhen reviewing any article where you suspect a conflict of interest, be especially on the lookout foradvertising masquerading as articles,promotional content,notability of commercial entities, overuse ofprimary orunreliable sources, and related problems. If you are not sure if there is a conflict of interest, or need help investigating one, ask at theCOI Noticeboard. At all times, remember toassume good faith and avoidcasting aspersions: an editor with an undisclosed conflict of interest may simply not be aware of our requirements.
In serious cases, the creator of a new page may need to be blocked to prevent further disruption or damage to Wikipedia's reputation. Familiarise yourself with theWP:UAA andWP:AIV systems and their policies and report such cases as necessary.
As a new page patroller, any action you take other than marking an article as reviewed is not likely to be welcomed by the page creator. In the best case scenario, they will simply listen to your feedback and address the issue promptly. However, disputes are common. Whether it is about a cleanup tag, a deletion nomination, a move to draft, or something else, try to approach these disputes with humility and empathy. Avoid the temptation to 'pull rank' over a user who probablyknows a lot less about our processes than you do. Even if you are completely correct in your judgement of an article, it is not surprising that the creator could react badly if you tell them that there is something wrong with their contribution, or threaten to remove it. New editors might be unfamiliar with our practice ofnot asking permission to fix problems – and its obverse, not being offended when someone points out a problem with your work. Experienced editors might be reluctant to acknowledge that they aren't immune to making mistakes. All reviewing disputes are more likely to be resolved amicably if you try to understand the other party's point of view before putting forth your own.
It is especially important to remember that thenew page reviewer right gives you thetechnical ability to mark pages "reviewed"; it does not give you any special decision-making powers over new articles. Like all advanced rights holders, from page movers to bureaucrats, the way you use your tools is subject to theconsensus of other editors. For example, if you move a page to draftspace and the creator of the article objects to this, there isno consensus on where the page should be. Therecommended course of action here is to return the page to the state it was in before the dispute began (i.e., in mainspace), and then attempt to solve it through discussion, for example, by opening anAfD.[3] You should not simply insist that the page remains in your preferred namespace because you are a new page patroller and the other editor is not.
Page Curation also includes a feature to 'unreview' a new article. Nobody is absolutely perfect and errors can happen. If you come across an article that appears to have been wrongly or inappropriately tagged, consider clicking the checkmark icon in the Page Curation toolbar ("Mark this page as unreviewed") and leave a friendly note for the patroller.
If you notice a patroller making frequent errors, tagging too quickly, or tag-bombing, offer friendly support or direct them to a specific section of this or another help page. In extreme cases you may need to inform an administrator, an NPP coordinator, or post atWP:ANI, butalways try to help your colleague first.
If a redirect or blanked page is converted to an article, it will be marked as unreviewed and placed in the new pages feed. This is to avoid people creating redirects for inappropriate pages and later converting them into articles to avoid review. If you see an old page (such as one from 2005 or 2016), it is likely that it was recently converted from a redirect. In these cases, you should check the page history, and if the page is not appropriate as an article, restore the redirect and notify the person who created the article. If you are reverted and you still believe the article is inappropriate, you should list it atArticles for Deletion. Redirects that are currently listed atRedirects for Discussion should simply be marked as reviewed.
[Mark this page as patrolled], which appears in the bottom right corner of some pages, makes an entry in the patrol log only. Clicking the green check mark in your toolbar always creates an entry in the page curation log, and often creates an entry in the patrol log, but not always due tosome bugs. Most people use the "mark as reviewed" button, so most people should be checking the page curation log exclusively. You canapply the "Reviewing" log filter if needed, which will filter out non-reviewing from the page curation log. The patrol log should usually be ignored.[Mark this page as patrolled] appears when the Page Curation toolbar is closed (see next bullet), and in namespaces where PageTriage doesn't operate (for example, draftspace, template space, and talk pages). We do not need to patrol non-mainspace pages methodically and should focus on mainspace.Editors with theadministrator user right can review new articles without any additional permissions. There are also a number of support tasks where admin assistance is especially needed:
Variousproject coordination tasks also benefit from the input of experienced editors.
Further reading if you're interested: How did we get here? |
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HistoryEditors regularly monitoredSpecial:NewPages from the earliest days of the project, before there was an organised new pages patrol.Uncle G's guide to article triage illustrates the workflow used for thesead hoc patrols. Two major constraints in these early days were that new pages only remained in the log for thirty days[9] and that there was no function to mark a page as reviewed. It was thus difficult for people looking at the log to know if a page had already been patrolled by someone else. Thefirst attempt to organise a new pages patrol (2004) tried to address this by working in shifts, so that someone would always be checking new pages as they were created, but it didn't work. New pages patrol was subsequently folded intorecent changes patrol for the next couple of years. The new pages patrol project as we know it wassplit off from recent changes patrol in December 2006. The ability to mark new pages as reviewed wasadded to MediaWiki in November 2007. Originally restricted to admins, it was made available to all autoconfirmed users shortly thereafter.[10][11] This brought with it a problem that has remained present ever since: the backlog. The thirty-day limit on pages appearing in theSpecial:NewPages remained, and articles would regularly move off it without being marked as reviewed.[12] By 2010–2011, there was a sense that new page patrollers could not cope with the workload, even though the actual number of pages needing to be manually patrolled had been decreasing steadily since 2007.[13] A bot was created totag these articles as "unpatrolled",[14] but a more permanent solution was needed. Motivated in large part by the pressure on new pages patrol,a major RfC in 2011 proposed that page creation should be restricted toautoconfirmed users.[15] It had previously been restricted to registered users in 2005, in an "experiment" initiated by Jimmy Wales following theSeigenthaler incident.[16] The RfC found a strong consensus for extending this requirement to autoconfirmed, but as a concession to those who were worried that this was too big of a compromise of the principle that anyone can edit, it was agreed it would first be put in place for a six-month trial (WP:ACTRIAL). However, controversially, MediaWiki developers refused to implement the change because it would "significantly and negatively impact the Foundation's goals of editor engagement",[17] leaving ACTRIAL in limbo for thenext six years. In the aftermath of the ACTRIAL controversy, A survey of patrollers was conducted by the community, which amongst other things indicated a desire for better tools for navigating and patrolling new articles.[18][19] whivch resulted in a direct collaboration with the WMF to improve the workflow of new page patrollers. The result was a new Mediawiki extension,PageTriage (originally called 'Zoom'), which was enabled on the English Wikipedia in 2012. It addedSpecial:NewPagesFeed (intended to replaceSpecial:NewPages) and thePage Curation tools.[20] Further work in 2018 in collaboration with the WMF addedAfC drafts,ORES predictions and automated copyright violation checking to the feed.[21] The new tools introduced in 2012 brought with them a small but consequential change: they removed the thirty-day limit on pages appearing in the new pages feed.[22] From this point on, all articles had to be explicitly reviewed. The user right, New Page Reviewer, was introduced in 2016 to ensure quality of reviewing. The system is the front line of interaction between new authors and the community's volunteers who maintain the quality of Wikipedia's articles.[23] |