[lucgagan]

Contributing to Wikipedia has become really not fun. Or maybe it never was. I tried writing an article about Playwright - perhaps the most common test automation tool these days. It first got rejected and now just has been sitting in review state for 3 months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Playwright_(software)

It is highly demotivating to try to write a quality article for Wikipedia because someone can just reject your days of work in seconds and then leave it in draft forever.

[mmiyer]

I want to point out that the version that got declined [1] definitely did not have any independent references to support notability [2] (and had it been accepted would probably have been nominated for deletion quickly).

The current version looks fine. Unfortunately reviewing drafts is a very thankless job (~90% of drafts are worthless) so there are never enough reviewers (speaking as an Wikipedia admin who used to review a lot of drafts). The backlog is definitely not something people are happy about, but it isn't easy to solve.

Also, having your drafts reviewed is actually not required. Once you have made 10 edits you can move the draft to the main article space yourself (or directly create articles). The reason why brand new users can't directly create articles is that whey they used to be able to, a ~third of all new articles ended up being deleted immediately because they were spam/gibberish/vandalism, which ends up both being a lot of work for reviewers, and very discouraging to those new users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Playwright_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

[denton-scratch]

It looks fine to me; some of the references look a bit obscure, but I wouldn't call them "unreliable". I'd say "Curb Safe Charmer" has been harsh; there are many, many articles that are supported by worse citations, and are less notable, but exist in mainspace.

[Edit] I wonder if Curb Safe Charmer automated his review using something like this?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02894-x

[pradn]

Go ahead an publish it. "Be bold" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

I've written dozens of articles starting from a few sentences and slowly expanding it over the course of a few days. I simply make sure the topic is notable enough and that every sentence is cited.

[raybb]

Hey I'm a moderately experienced wikipedia editor. And yeah it's a really annoying thing when you don't get recognized for the hard work put into creating a draft like this. When I'm back at my computer maybe I'll take a look and see how I can help improve your draft.

Generally the hardest and most annoying part about a case like this is wikipedia's desire for reliable sources which generally means newspapers or academic sources. You can have something super well known, around forever, and often mentioned but it can be hard to find sources writing about it directly. For example, I wrote the Wikipedia article for high touch (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-touch) and it was quite annoying to try to find sources. Similarly I wrote one for "smell training" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell_training) and the requirements are even higher for anything related to medicine.

Anyway, I'm not gonna say I advise you to do this. But if you're really confident that the article meets the notability guidelines you can also create the article in mainspace (instead of draft). If someone tries to delete it then the guidelines are a little different (vs reviewing drafts) because they have to be sure that there aren't sources to make it notable (not just that you didn't use them). Often times people will actually find sources and add them to the article rather than just complain you don't have good enough ones.

PS: I'm sure someone will come and explain why I'm wrong here but this has generally been my experience.

[ghaff]

>wikipedia's desire for reliable sources which generally means newspapers or academic sources

Which is one of the main ironies associated with Wikipedia notability. Something or someone written about in some small-town newspaper or an obscure journal that five people have read can be considered more notable than something with a fairly big online footprint but nothing canonical.

For that matter, there's a ton of pre-web information that just doesn't really much exist outside of primary sources.

[raybb]

One more tip is sometimes you can hop on IRC and ask for live feedback :)

[ta988]

Same here that's why I don't write articles for wikipedia anymore. It is always the same old clique that decides what is worth or not. We are loosing information on the resource that was supposed to make it available for all. All of that in the name of ego back scratching.

[capitainenemo]

I think FOSS projects always struggle on notability, with deletionists targetting sources that are relatively minor FOSS magazines, even those with actual print runs. FOSS projects rarely have the marketing team to pay or nag to get a mention in a larger trade mag..

What's interesting is this is more a phenomenon on the English wikipedia, so if you're disappointed that a search for information on a FOSS project is turning up nothing on en.wikipedia.org, try just switching en for fr or de (both relatively large) and then using google translate or your browser's built-in translate [firefox] to get the info you need.

Sad. And yeah, I feel deletionists are out of control on english wikipedia.

[tivert]

> Contributing to Wikipedia has become really not fun. Or maybe it never was. I tried writing an article about Playwright - perhaps the most common test automation tool these days. It first got rejected and now just has been sitting in review state for 3 months.

It only gets worse. Try getting into a content dispute sometime.

[crazygringo]

That sounds terrible.

I don't know how Wikipedia works -- is there not a way to submit a smaller/stub page or something, and then once it passes review for notability, then you fill out the rest?

Does Wikipedia expect people to put in days of work before an article gets approved? I hope that's not the case.

[laurent_du]

Looking at the profile of your reviewer, it seems that they take pride in contributing to the deletion of several Wikipedia articles. It's possible that your article was just a collateral victim of this editor's penchant for deletion.

[qingcharles]

WTF. 4 month review backlog? Why is there even a review system at all? This isn't a legal journal, this is Wikipedia. Your article looks great. Playwright is a very notable piece of software, extensively used.

I hate when things get mature and enshittify.

[swalling]

It really sucks, but the reason why review happened is because there is an onslaught of people who show up to write promotional articles, many of them paid by PR agencies and reputation management firms.

The previous system of doing post-publish review of new articles had an even worse backlog because it let a huge volume of shit into the front door.

The root cause of this is Wikipedia’s huge influence in Google SEO and knowledge graph. As the open web is dying, it’s one of the few reliable ways to dump information straight to the top of Google SERPs. When I write new Wikipedia articles it is often indexed to the first page of results in minutes.

[denton-scratch]

> Why is there even a review system at all?

I don't create articles these days; it's too much like hard work.

You used to be able to create an article by making a redlink wikilink somewhere, and then clicking it - that would take you to an editor. The new article would appear in mainspace. Do you have to "volunteer" to appear in mainspace? Are all new articles deemed to be "draft", and subject to review nowadays? Or are some users allowed to create new articles in mainspace, and others not? If so, what are the criteria?

[mmiyer]

The criteria for creating an article in mainspace is to have made 10 edits and have an account more than 4 days old.

[denton-scratch]

Thanks! That's a pretty low threshold to surmount. @lucgagan: you've done the time. Try editing a few articles - copyediting is enough. Then delete your draft, and create a new mainspace article.

[qingcharles]

OK, panic over. Nothing to see here. I wondered why I had never seen this feature in any of my article creations.

[gbear605]

It still works like it used to, there’s just a requirement of having made ten edits first before you’re allowed to. That’s a fairly low bar, and it gets rid of a ton of spam that used to be created.

[goostavos]

My first wikipedia edit was correcting the elevation of the tallest point in one of Seattle's neighborhoods. It was immediately removed. In fact, the entire section about the neighborhood's elevation was removed. So, the whole reason I was at Wikipedia in the first place was removed. I thought briefly about adding it back in, because I thought it was super valuable, but upon looking at the profile of who made the edit and finding a "U mad I deleting your work? lmao" style comment at the top, I noped outta there. Petty edit wars on the internet over trivial nonsense sounded like a dumb way to spend time.

[lucgagan]

Ended up publishing to mainspace as per the guidance of a few commenters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playwright_(software)

Thanks!