Wikipedia:New pages patrol

For the NewPP counter and its template limits, see Wikipedia:Template limits.

Shortcuts: WP:NPP WP:Newpp

Wikimedia Foundation is inviting former and current new page patrollers to take part in a survey. If you have patrolled pages and would like to be included in the survey, and you have not received an invitation on your talk page by Wednesday 26 October 2011 at 23:59 (UTC), please add yourself HERE to receive an invitation. The poll will close on Monday 7 November.

This page in a nutshell: New pages patrol is a Wikipedia communal patrol which describes the process of checking and performing classification upon newly created pages. It is an essential tutorial for patrollers.

New pages patrol is a process by which newly created articles are checked for obvious problems. The patrol is entirely voluntary and carries no obligation. At its heart, it's really just a way to see that every page gets checked in a timely manner and is given a boost on its way to becoming a quality article, and that Wikipedia is not deluged with poor-quality articles and totally inappropriate pages.

NewPages Defcon 4

The queue at Special:NewPages is currently 21.16 days.

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Last updated 12 hours ago by Snotbot.

CSD Defcon

Category:Candidates for speedy deletion is currently 186% backlogged.

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Patrolling new pages

Wondering why Special:Newpages has highlighting? See here for full details about this software feature.

G10 attack pages must be blanked, and deleted very quickly. The G10 CSD template automatically loads a red alert on administrators' control panels to ensure this happens rapidly. Please be absolutely sure to read such new pages carefully and not confuse them with G3 hoax or vandalism.

CorenSearchBot is temporarily not working; there is no current automated process for detecting copyright violations. Articles about organizations are especially prone to 'borrowing' content from other sources. Therefore, when reviewing a new page, please consider

1. For single reference articles, comparing the article's content to the reference and looking for copy/pastes or close paraphrasing
2. Running a random passage of text from the article through a search engine (such as Google) for that exact phrase to see if it has been copied from anywhere. If you find similar text on other sites, use the Duplication detector. If appropriate, tag an article that is a blatant copyright violation for speedy deletion under G12.

Special:Newpages

Special:Newpages logs new pages as they are created. It is advisable to patrol new pages from the bottom of the log: pages only stay in the queue for 30 days (720 hours), and there can be a considerable backlog. After 30 days, unpatrolled pages are removed from Special:Newpages and added to Category:Unreviewed new articles by a bot. Working on the backlog eliminates complaints from editors that you tagged their page for deletion only two minutes after its creation. This should give the creating editor enough time to improve a new page before a patroller attends to it, particularly if the patroller tags the page for speedy deletion.
Tagging anything other than attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense only a few minutes after creation is not likely to be constructive and may only serve to annoy the page author. And remember – if you don't click the 'patrolled' link, the article will remain in the 'unpatrolled' queue.

The New page patrol page.

Especially if the new article has a {{newpage}}, {{inuse}}, or {{underconstruction}} template showing, care should be taken to ensure that the author has finished the initial version before you evaluate the page. A good rule of thumb is to wait until at least 15 minutes after the last edit before tagging the article (or up to an hour for the {{newpage}} tag). Additionally, it may be helpful to check the editor history to be sure that you don't offend an experienced editor who has a set plan to create a valid article.

HOT tip

If you have not committed all the CSD criteria to memory, and you find the short descriptions in Twinkle not clear enough, keep a window of this page open on your computer, and remember that NPP is not something you can do easily or accurately from a net book, tablet, or a smart phone.

Be nice to the newbies

Throughout the entire process of NP patrol, it is important to remember not to bite the newbies. Far from being a monolithic horde of vandals, trolls, and spammers, the available evidence seems to indicate that newcomers write most of Wikipedia's content. If you see a new user or IP address contributing significantly, {{welcome}} or {{welcome-anon}} them if you're so inclined, and include a pointer or two of feedback about how they can make their contributions even better. Most will gladly welcome the support.

It is also important to assume good faith as much as possible, or, minimally, to assume incompetence instead of malice. For example, remember not everyone is as computer-literate as you; some people will accidentally blank or damage pages when attempting to cut and paste material from Wikipedia. Others may not understand that, yes, their changes really are visible to the entire world immediately; consider using {{Uw-draftfirst}} to suggest that new users work on their article as a userspace draft.

Remember that children also contribute, and they are not all vandals (some of our New Page Patrollers are also very young and inexperienced!), You may wish to copy and add this link to their talk page: [[WP:Guidance for younger editors|''Guidance for younger editors'']]

Please do not be too hasty with certain speedy deletions, especially those lacking context (CSD A1) or content (CSD A3). Research has shown that writers unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines should have 10 to 15 minutes to fix the article before it is nominated for speedy deletion. If you see a page that has been tagged too hastily, please notify the tagger about their hasty deletion with the {{uw-hasty}} template. The template {{hasty|one hour after creation UTM}} can also be added to the tagged article to flag that it was hastily tagged.

Patroller checklists

New page patrolling is intended to catch problems with new articles, and either fix those problems or tag the article for future cleanup by other editors. There are a few basic checks that all new page patrollers should perform on each article they patrol. Following the checklist below can help ensure that our new articles are quickly improved, and not lost in the shuffle.

Article namespace checklist

Common reasons for speedy deletion of new articles

• G1: Pages consisting of incoherent or gibberish text. {{db-nonsense}}
• G3: Pure vandalism and blatant hoaxes. {{db-vandalism}} or {{db-hoax}}
• G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion. {{db-spam}}
• G12: Unambiguous copyright infringement. {{db-copyvio|url=source URL}}
• A1: Lacking sufficient context to identify the subject of the article. {{db-nocontext}}
• A3: No content. {{db-nocontent}}
• A7: No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content). {{db-person}} {{db-band}} {{db-club}} {{db-inc}} {{db-web}} {{db-animal}}
• A9: No indication of importance (albums and songs). {{db-album}} {{db-song}}

Note: The descriptions above are brief summaries of these speedy deletion criteria. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the exact criteria before tagging an article for speedy deletion. See WP:CSD.

• Does the article qualify for speedy deletion? If the article matches any of these criteria, mark the page for speedy deletion by adding the appropriate template to the top of the page.
• Does the article belong on Wikipedia? An article may qualify for deletion if it has obvious notability problems, is a content fork, or suffers from any other common reasons for deletion. First, consider the steps listed at WP:BEFORE. Then, if you believe that the article is not salvageable, either propose it for deletion or nominate it for deletion, whichever is more appropriate.

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• Does the article have an appropriate title? Titles should conform to the standards at WP:TITLE. If the title is inappropriate, it may be necessary to move the article to a more appropriate title. Common errors are capitalizing every word in the title, not capitalizing proper nouns, and including honorifics, academic titles, and postnominals.
• Is the article very short? If so, it may be a stub. Either add {{Stub}} to the article, or (even better) find a more specific stub-sorting template to use at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types.

Common referencing problems

• Add {{Unreferenced}} if the article has no references and no external links.
• Add {{BLP unsourced}} if the subject of the article is a living person and the article is unreferenced.
• Add {{No footnotes}} if the articles has no references, but does have external links.
• Add {{Primary sources}} if the article has references, but they are from primary sources.
• Add {{Refimprove}} if the article has references, but they are not from reliable sources.
• Add {{BLP sources}} if the subject of the article is a living person and the article lacks references from reliable sources.
• Add {{Cleanup-link rot}} if the article has references, but those references only consist of bare URL's.

• Is the article referenced? References are essential to Wikipedia articles. If the article is unreferenced or poorly referenced, you may be able to improve the article by adding better references. Otherwise, add appropriate tag(s) to the top of the article (see collapsed box to the right).
• Is the article categorized? If the article is not assigned to any categories, either add {{Uncategorized}} to the very bottom of the article, or add some appropriate categories to the bottom of the article. It is usually fairly easy to find two or three appropriate categories.
• Do other articles link to this article? Click the "What links here?" link (in the Toolbox, left margin) to see how many articles link to the article you're patrolling. If the article has less than three incoming links (from actual articles, excluding pages in other namespaces like User talk, Talk, Wikipedia, etc.) add {{Orphan}} to the top of the page. Conversely, if the article has few or no links to other articles, add {{Deadend}} to the top.
• Is the article properly formatted? Does the article have a proper lead section? Is the subject of the article bolded in the first sentence? Does the article use strange formatting conventions which don't conform to the manual of style? If so, either fix the issues or add {{Wikify}} to the top of the article.
• Does the article have grammar or spelling mistakes? If so, either fix the mistakes or add {{Copyedit}}.
• Does the article have any other glaring issues? Check Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup for any appropriate cleanup tags that might need to be applied to the article.

Article namespace checklist tips

• Don't be discouraged by the number of things that need to be checked. Once you get into a rhythm, you can check all of the above things in less than 30 seconds. As you become more familiar with patrolling, you will no longer need to "check" for such things, but instead you begin to spot them instinctively.
• It's preferable to include dates in your cleanup tags, for instance: {{Unreferenced|date=November 2011}}. This helps to quickly track how long an article has suffered from a particular issue.
• If there are more than three cleanup tags at the top of an article, it's generally preferable to condense the cleanup tags using the {{Multiple issues}} template.
• Tools exist to help speed up and automate the process of adding cleanup tags to articles, nominating articles for deletion, and tagging articles for speedy deletion. The most popular include Twinkle (with the Friendlytag add-on for cleanup tags) and AutoWikiBrowser.
• New page patrollers are highly encouraged to patrol the oldest pages in the queue first (i.e. patrol from the back of the queue). It is often considered disruptive for new page patrollers to add cleanup tags and/or propose the deletion of articles that are only a few minutes old.
• There are a lot of new pages created every day! New page patrollers are encouraged to fix as many issues as they practically can, and add cleanup tags for any issues that haven't been addressed.
• Familiarize yourself with the common outcomes for deletion discussions to get a better idea of which articles are usually deleted and which are usually kept.

Other issues

• Stubs, which are the beginnings of meaningful and encyclopedic articles but which need a little help (a little wikifying, as it were). The basics of wikifying stubs:
  • Bold face the article title.
  • Link relevant terms.
  • Phrase the article in complete sentences, including the first.
  • Place an appropriate stub notice at the end of the stub.

• Style problems. First, try to fix any style problems yourself. If you cannot, add one or more specific cleanup tags for pages which need tidying up. In particular, the following tags are common:

• {{cleanup|date=November 2011}} -- for general problems
• {{wikify|date=November 2011}} -- for articles that need appropriate formatting or linking
• {{internallinks|TOPIC}} -- a variant of wikify for pages that are properly formatted, but need linking to other related topics.
• {{unreferenced|article}} -- for articles that conspicuously lack references

• Mistitled articles. Usually it's straightforward to move a page to a more appropriate title (WP:Name) using the "move page" function. Sometimes you'll find that an article under the other title already exists, in which case you should try to merge any new material from the newly created article into the old one, leaving a redirect in place of the new page.
• Categorization Check that the article has been assigned to a useful category and if not, either tag it with {{uncat}} or try to find a category for it. If the article links to other Wikipedia articles, you can check their categorizations for ideas, or assign the article to one of the fundamental categories.
• Orphaned articles Checking the "What links here" link will tell you if any other page points to the newly created article. Sometimes orphans result from a mistitled article (see above). Other times you'll want to find a related article and link the new one to it. It may be helpful to search for mentions in other articles. If none are found, an {{Orphan}} tag can be placed.
• Articles without sources The best time to ask for sources is when an article is fresh and the contributor is still around to ask about the origin of the information in it. Tag articles with {{unreferenced}} and let the contributor know with {{subst:uw-unsourced1}}, or try to find some yourself. If there aren't any, it might need to be deleted.
• Foreign language articles. Tag the page with {{notenglish}} and list it at Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English. Do not run the page through an online translator and submit the results.

Moving new content to other projects

• Dictionary definitions. These can be transwikied to Wiktionary or converted into disambiguation pages. Many may be redeemable as Wikipedia articles, if sufficiently refactored, rewritten, and expanded.
• Primary source texts. These should be transwikied to Wikisource.
• How-tos or instructional materials. In some cases, these can be transwikied to Wikibooks; however, it's often possible to turn these into meaningful articles by rewording the text to make it more descriptive and less prescriptive. Try to improve an article by adding some more material before resorting to moving it out of Wikipedia.

New pages that may require deletion

• Speedy deletion candidates. Read and be familiar with the speedy deletion criteria, then if you see any such pages created, tag them with {{db|Your reason here}}, so that they can be deleted by an administrator. You may want to use one of the following, which provides the reason from the criteria automatically: {{db-empty}}, {{db-bio}}, {{db-repost}}, {{db-attack}} or {{db-music}}, {{db-spam}}, or {{db-nonsense}}. You might also want to consider placing {{test}} on the creator's user talk page to help point him or her in the right direction. If you tag an article for deletion as a non-notable bio, you may opt to notify the user who created the article with {{nn-warn}}. Many of the speedy delete templates suggest a readily formed tag that appears at the bottom of the resulting speedy deletion box and can be easily copied and pasted into the creator's user talk page. When leaving messages for new editors, consider using {{firstarticle}} rather than the usual warnings.

Speedy deletion is a tool which can easily be overused. Since speedy deletion removes a page without discussion, an article should not be tagged for speedy delete if there is any plausible reason that the article should be kept. In particular, an article should not be tagged for speedy delete using A7 for not being notable (in your opinion): an article does not have to prove that its subject is notable, it only has to pass the much lower test of asserting importance or significance (whether it actually is notable is a subject for an AfD discussion, not a speedy deletion). Consider using a Notability tag instead of a speedy delete tag. Also, an article should not be tagged for speedy deletion if it's possible that it might be improved into an article which should be kept. Pay attention to the guideline "Contributors sometimes create articles over several edits, so try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its creation if it appears incomplete." It is not a rule of Wikipedia that an article has to be perfect the instant it's first posted; that's why we have edits.

Unreferenced BLPs New unreferenced Biographies of Living People can be tagged for deletion with {{subst:prod blp}}, which gives ten days to add a reliable source to the article. This is only for literally unsourced articles, not for ones that have a poor source that mentions the subject, nor is it for articles such as rock groups that mention living people, only for biographies of living individual humans. Please remember to inform the author, especially if they are a newbie.

• Unsuitable pages. Pages about individuals, places, or things which generally don't merit an encyclopedia entry should be tagged with {{subst:prod|Your reason here}} or, if someone could reasonably defend its existence (or if a prod has been added and removed already), listed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. What exactly qualifies as encyclopedic is debatable, though, so it's best to err on the side of caution and not delete or nominate for deletion too hastily.
• Copyright violations. One way to check for a possible copyright infringement is to do an internet search; however, not all text is on the internet; search engines do not index all the internet's text, and some texts available through search engines are public domain and thus suitable for import into Wikipedia. These public domain texts include the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. You might also like to use this handy tool.
  • Blank the page and replace the text with {{copyvio|url=insert URL here}} ~~~~
  • Go to today's section of the copyvio page and add {{subst:article-cv | PageName}} from [insert URL here] ~~~~ to the bottom of the list. Put the page's name in place of "PageName". If there is no URL, use a description of the source. (The template you used to blank the article will generate this code and the following one in the bottom right hand corner.)
  • Please also add {{subst:uw-copyright| PageName}} to the article creator's talk page.

Blatant copyright infringements may be speedily deleted. If an article and all its revisions are unquestionably copied from a website which does not have a license compatible with Wikipedia, and the uploader does not assert permission, you may use {{db-copyvio|url=url of source}} instead of the standard copyvio notice, and an admin will decide whether or not to immediately delete the article. Notify the creator using {{Nothanks-sd}} or a similar message.

• Be hesitant to list articles on Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion if there's a chance they could be improved and made into a meaningful article. Tag them for cleanup instead. Try not to step on people's toes. Users will often start an article as the briefest of stubs, and then expand it over the following hours or days.

Use of the {{prod}} tag may be more suitable in these situations. This tag may be removed by any editor, thereby averting the proposed deletion. This way, if the creator is serious about improving the article to meet Wikipedia's standards for inclusion, s/he may remove the tag and improve the article in the coming days. But if the creator subsequently abandons his/her attempts to construct the article, and it just sits, it will automatically be deleted in seven days. Regardless, it is a good idea to notify the creator of this tag placement, following the instructions on the template itself.

If you believe the article will probably meet Wikipedia standards one day and has a chance of improvement by someone else, you do not want to prod-tag it, but rather place other appropriate improvement templates on the page.

In any case, if you are unsure whether a page will be improved in the coming days, you may want to place it on your watchlist. The {{construction}} tag may be placed on a new page by a creator to inform new page patrollers and other editors that the article is still being constructed, and its early revisions may not meet Wikipedia's standard for inclusion. If the creator has not placed it there him/herself, you may want to place it there yourself. Many editors, especially newbies, are not familiar with this tag. The {{construction}} tag does not make a new page totally immune from deletion; see Wikipedia:Deletion of pages under construction for details on when a page under construction can be deleted.

You may want to contact the creator on his/her talk page to ascertain the creator's intentions regarding future construction of the page prior to taking any such action. If you do so, try to learn from the creator about the purpose of the new page and any sources that may be used to establish notability and verifiability, two of the most important aspects regarding suitability for a page's inclusion. It may be helpful to discuss one-on-one with the creator some possible ways to make the page more worthy of inclusion or otherwise improving it, and if this is not possible, to name one or more articles the topic can be merged or redirected to.

• Always check the history and the talk page. A new page might be a recreation of a previously deleted article. With other articles, someone may have removed a tag. The talk page may contain a notice that indicates that the article has already survived an AfD.

Dealing with foreign language new pages

Not everyone is a linguist, but the Google Translate facility can easily be used to help guess the language - e.g. if it looks like Arabic but the translation makes no sense, try Persian (Farsi), or it may be Chinese or Japanese, so try both. Remember also that several languages use Cyrillic, so it might not be Russian. If you know or can guess the language, then put, e.g., {{notenglish|Spanish}}. That gives a more useful template, including a link to the relevant foreign Wikipedia, and also a link to Google Translate, which will show you a machine translation - rough and ready, but often good enough to tell you that the article is about a non notable band, person, company, organisation, or nonsense, and can be speedy tagged without bothering to list it at PNT. Note: Google now also incorporates a language detector if you are not sure what the language is.

{{db-foreign}} or {{db-a2}} should only be used in the situation (not very common) where an article from a non-English-language Wikipedia has been cut-and-pasted here. That is not allowed because it loses the editing history, which we have to maintain for attribution to the original authors. The message generated for the author points him to the correct procedure at WP:TRANSLATE. The foreign WP reference should be included in the tag, e.g. {{db-foreign|source=es:Warekena}}. Note that {{db-nonsense}} does not apply to "coherent non-English material".

Much more usually, what we get is a foreign text input by somebody who probably doesn't know any other Wikipedia exists. The right tag then is {{notenglish}}, which is not a speedy request, because sometimes these articles are worth translating. When that expands on the article page, it gives you a message and a link to the place to paste it on the list of pages needing translation at WP:PNT, where someone who knows the language may pick it up and translate or PROD, BLPPROD or whatever is appropriate.

To check if it is a copyright violation, do a Google check as well (copy and paste a sentence or a text fragment into Google) If it is, it can be speedily deleted under G12.

Finally, you might wish to notify the author (recommended). If you have listed the page at PNT, the standard message is {{Uw-notenglish}}. There is also a useful set of message templates such as {{contrib-ru1}}, many of them bilingual, to tell the author that we require English and point him to the foreign WP. List of them at WP:PNT/T.

Tools

• Twinkle is a user script that contains quick reverting, deletion, warning, and reporting features. It can be used to tag articles for speedy deletion, and it automatically marks pages as patrolled when applying tags. The script includes all of the most commonly used article tags, and makes sure that article creators are automatically notified of CSD, PROD, BLPPROD, and AfD tags.
• New Page Patroller shows a box in the sidebar that loads a live feed updated every 5 seconds of the 10 newest articles.
• NPWatcher is a new-page monitoring and reporting tool for Windows. It also provides extensive deletion processing tools for admins.
• Kissle is a very similar program to NPWatcher for Windows.
• RC patrol script permits rapid tagging of new pages with the relevant criteria for speedy deletion (ie: for articles that don't indicate the subject's significance, use "A7"). This tool isn't useful for new page patrol unless you have some of the CSDs committed to memory. However, it also gives non-admins tools for revert, filter, and popup, while using the (default) monobook skin.
• Edit Filter 342, which catches cases where redirects are changed into articles.
• The WikiProject Check Wikipedia script scans new pages on a daily basis, and passes them through a series of Wiki syntax checks. The result is listed as a series of reports of pages to fix.
• WikiAlerter (beta) is a Windows program designed to aid users in tagging pages for deletion and patrolling new pages.

Manually marking pages as patrolled

In some editing contexts, editors will see a 'mark this page as patrolled' link. Otherwise, everything editors can do to help out with patrolling is most welcome.

Userboxes

New Pages Patrol Userboxes
Regular NP patrollers may wish to put the NP patrol userbox on their user page by adding {{User wikipedia/NP Patrol}}: This user is a new page patroller.
You may also want to add New page patrol; [[WP:NPP|You can help!]] to your edit summary.

Awards

Usage: {{subst:The New Page Patroller's Barnstar|message ~~~~}}

The New Page Patroller's Barnstar The New Page Patroller's Barnstar may be awarded to users who do great work patrolling new pages. This may be improving, tagging for deletion, tagging for issues etc., but don't dilute the spirit of the barnstar system by handing them out indiscriminately.

Related pages

• Field guide to proper speedy deletion
• User:Kudpung/NPP mentoring - if you are still not sure how to patrol new pages, you can get advice here.
• New pages patrol/30-day list - problems associated with NPP, and development.
• Category:Unreviewed new articles - bot listed from the 30-day ovespill
• New pages patrol/patrollers
• New pages patrol/Survey

Related projects

• Wikimedia research into patroller performance
• WikiProject New page (Inactive)
• Magic spell to deal with "unpatrollable" pages

See also

• User:AlexNewArtBot – bot categorization of new pages
• User:Uncle G/Wikipedia triage
• Wikipedia:Autopatrolled
• Wikipedia:Deletion of newly created pages
• Wikipedia:Drawing attention to new pages
• Wikipedia:Patrols
• Wikipedia:Random page patrol
• Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol
• Wikipedia:Speedy deletions
• Wikipedia:Why I Hate Speedy Deleters
• Ten Commandments for Speedy Deletion
• Common A7 mistakes