User:Swpb/What Wikipedia needs

Wikipedia needs:

Easier sanctions for bad behavior that doesn't break the letter of the law

Editors don't have to violate 3RR or WP:CIVIL to make editing a miserable experience for others. There are lots of toxic editors who know how to walk the line, and the tools for dealing with them are insufficient. ARB is slow and often unavailable. On ANI, the bar for sanctions usually requires explicit rule-breaking, but there's no reason this should be so – editors that harm the project with their behavior should be subject to topic bans and editing blocks on that basis alone. The fact that they are not enables abuse that drives away more valuable editors.

Article wizard (but not AfC) by default for new editors

We have a bewildering array of content guidelines (1, 2, 3), intro pages (1, 2, 3), and draft spaces (1, 2, 3), but new editors can easily breeze past all that and click "create", then get discouraged when their page gets speedied. Newly autoconfirmed editors should be sent directly to the article wizard, where they have to explicitly assert that their new page is, at the very least: 1) on a plausibly notable topic; 2) not covered by an existing article; 3) at least nominally sourced; and 4) not copied from somewhere else. Sending these editors through the wizard would be a minor impediment to page creation by new editors, but would cut down hugely on the number of speedied pages, and the discouragement of their creators. Articles for Creation, on the other hand, has mixed results—as a manual review process, it does keep garbage out, but its slowness is unambiguously harmful to new editor retention.

Admin promotion/demotion reform

It's widely acknowledged that RfA is broken; the process is a nightmare, and does little to ensure good admin performance. Consequently, there are far too few new admins for the workload. At the same time, it's far too difficult to remove admins who fail in their responsibilities. Admins need to be held to a higher standard of neutrality, civility, and fairness than regular editors, and they need to be removable when they fail to meet that standard. Admins need not break the rules to harm the project. But because of the shortage of new admins caused by the failure of RfA, there is no significant push to make it easier to demote bad admins.

Simple interfaces

Wikitext is off-putting to many of the kinds of editors we should be trying to attract. VisualEditor and Flow need work, but they are absolutely the future. Editors who are not comfortable with wikitext should have an easy, immediately available alternative for editing articles and talk pages. The wikitext-literacy gap is too often used to bludgeon new editors who make technical mistakes. Lack of technical expertise does not mean an editor has nothing of value to contribute.

More responsive software development

In many ways, Wikipedia is successful despite, not because of, the MediaWiki software. While the wiki model was once groundbreaking, the software has not kept up with the times. Improvements like Flow have been promised for years, and only haltingly delivered. Phabricator tickets are sometimes addressed in hours, and sometimes languish for years, with no transparency into how priorities and deadlines are assigned. The WMF needs to invest in a proper development infrastructure, and needs to prioritize community-requested fixes and improvements over its own pet projects, like the now-infamous Knowledge Engine.

Wikipedia doesn't need:

Resistance to change

Many things around here are the way they are not because that's the best way, but because that's the way it's always been. While the editor community is good at building and maintaining content, it's too reactionary to produce the kinds of systemic improvements Wikipedia needs to attract and retain a broader editor base. The amount of bureaucracy that the community has built up is largely at fault for our poor editor retention. The WMF is often right to make unilateral moves to improve process and functionality, despite the protests of many in the community.