Newcomer at the Hausa Wikipedia accompanying the new content they were adding with a reference after Edit check prompted them.
Reference Check deployments - the first Edit Check (references) is now live at 11 wikis. You can see the kinds of edits people are making by visiting the links to Special:Recent changes listed on Edit check/Deployment status. Additional deployments to the Arabic and Vietnamese Wikipedias are scheduled for the week of 4 December.
Community Call - 10 French-speaking volunteers joined members of the Editing Team for a community call on Tuesday, 28 November. See a summary of the conversation here.
Reference Reliability - to support the next Edit Check (reference reliability), the team is developing an API that will enable Citoid to provide people feedback when the domain they are attempting to cite exists on MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist or MediaWiki:BlockedExternalDomains.json.
Upcoming
An early mockup of what the multi-check user experience could look like. User script - Edit check will soon be available via a user script. This will make it easier for volunteers to experiment with Edit check regardless of if and how it is deployed at the wiki they are wanting to assess it on.
Multi-Check - Currently, Edit Check is configured to show people one piece of feedback, regardless if other feedback might be warranted. The team is in the early stages of designing a user experience that will accommodate presenting people with multiple checks within a single edit.
The first Edit Check (editcheck-references) prompted people adding new content to include a reference when they did not do so themselves.
The next Edit Check will prompt people to replace a source when they attempt to cite a domain a project has deemed to be spam.
The Editing Team sees this as a first step towards a potential future where editing interfaces can use the consensus stored in pages like w:WP:RSP to offer people feedback about the source they are attempting to cite.
The designs we are exploring are pictured here.
We now need your help: Which approach do you favor most? What about that approach do you appreciate? What questions/concerns do these approaches bring to your mind?
Last Wednesday (11 October 2023), Edit Check became available within the desktop and mobile visual editor at an initial set of wikis:
dag.wikipedia.org, ee.wikipedia.org, fat.wikipedia.org, gur.wikipedia.org, gpe.wikipedia.org, ha.wikipedia.org, kg.wikipedia.org, ln.wikipedia.org, tw.wikipedia.org
You can review the edits Edit Check was activated within by filtering Special:RecentChanges using the editcheck-references-activated tag.
Proportion of new content edits that include a reference
Baseline metrics
Proportion of new content edits reverted by user experience level
Two of the metrics the Editing Team is planning to use to evaluate the impact of the initial reference check are:
A decrease in the proportion of new content edits that are reverted
An increase in the proportion of new content edits that include references
To help set targets for the two metrics named above, we recently completed a baseline analysis.
Here's some of what we learned:
Across all Wikipedias, new content edits that include a reference are ~2x less likely to be reverted (6.2%) than edits that do not include a reference (11.5%)
Across all Wikipedias, newcomers and junior editors are less likely to include a new reference with new content edits compared to more senior editors.
Of all the new content edits newcomers make across Wikipedias, 12% of these edits include a reference.
Of all the new content edits people who have made >500 cumulative edits across Wikipedias, 26% of these edits edit include a reference
In March, we shared plans to present people who decline to add a source when Edit Check prompts them to do so with a way to share why they made this decision.
To start, the reason someone selects for declining to add a reference when Edit Check invites them to do so will get logged as an edit tag that is "appended" to that edit.
The definitions for these yet-to-be defined tags will eventually be stored here: Edit check/Tags.
These tags will help us collectively evaluate the extent to which the reference Edit Check increases the likelihood that people accompany the new content they're adding with a reference.
Tag
Description
Try it
editcheck-newreference
Edits made with the visual editor that involve people adding a new reference to an article in the main namespace.
enwiki, frwiki
editcheck-newcontent
Edits made with the visual editor that involve people adding new content to article in the main namespace
Note: the logic that determine when the two tags get applied is the same logic that is used to decide whether people should be presented with the reference Edit Check.
Reference Edit Check demo (mobile)
Edit Check Prototype (mobile) ready
A prototype for the first Edit Check is ready!
Now, we need your help identifying how it might need to be fixed and improved before being enabled in production as a beta feature.
For context, this first Edit Check that will prompt newcomers who are contributing new content without including a corresponding reference to consider doing so.
What people who ''decline'' to add a citation when Edit Check invites them to do so might see.
First version
The first version of Edit Check is almost ready for you all to try!
Within the next week, you can expect us to share a link to a test wiki where you can try the Edit Check prototype.
In the meantime, you can see the kinds of edits EditCheck currently thinks warrant a reference, by filtering Recent changes using the newly-introduced editcheck-references tag.
View the tag on enwiki and frwiki.
Informed by community conversations (still ongoing)[1][2][3][4] and a series of technical and design investigations[5][6][7], during February the Editing Team became clear about the first version of Edit Check on mobile...
The initial version of the mobile Edit Check experience that will prompt people to add a reference.
User Experience - the first version of Edit Check will introduce a new step within the mobile visual editor's publishing workflow that people will see if/when they add new content without a reference. Design for the desktop user experience is still underway. See T329579.
Usability Testing - to learn whether people understand and can intuitively navigate the mobile Edit Check workflow, we will soon begin a series of usability tests. See T327356.
Technical Investigation - Edit Check will use a "transaction-based" approach for determining what new content is added within a given edit session. Work on developing a way to detect individual sentences is ongoing in T324363.
Initial Heuristic - To start, the initial Edit Check heuristic will be relatively straightforward in so far as it will prompt people to decide whether the change they are making warrants a reference if/when they are adding a new paragraph and that paragraph does not already contain a reference. See T324730 and T329988#8654867.
Next up: the Editing Team will be implementing the initial Edit Check heuristic (T324730) and a corresponding hiddenchange tag (T324733) so that we – volunteers and members of the Editing Team – can evaluate the extent to which the reference check heuristic is getting initiated in expected cases.
Work on Edit Check is underway! Below you will find an overview of what the Editing team is actively working on…
Community conversations - Between October 2022 and January 2023, the Editing Team hosted seven community conversations to learn what contributing to Wikipedia has been like for people living in and from Sub-Saharan Africa. Next week, you can expect the team to publish the findings from these conversations and how they will inform the work we do on this project.
Initial Focus - The first feature the team will be introducing is one that checks whether the new content people are attempting to add includes a reference. Learn more in the Strategy and Approach section below.
Design - The team is actively working on a proposal for what the mobile user experience for the first reference check could be like. In the coming weeks, we will be inviting volunteers to help us revise and refine these designs. In the meantime, you can follow along with this work in Phabricator.
Talking with experienced volunteers - For the "Reference Check" to be useful to inexperienced and experienced volunteers alike, it will need to guide people to cite references in ways that projects expect. In the coming weeks, we'll begin conversations with experienced volunteers to learn what these expectations are so that we can ensure Edit Check is configured in ways that align with them.
Technical investigations - For the "Reference Check" to work, the software will need to know when people are attempting to add new content, whether that new content warrants a reference, and whether it currently contains a reference. The Editing Engineering team is currently doing a series of technical investigations to decide how we will approach building this functionality.
