Page Curation/Testing

Page Curation is a suite of tools developed by the w:Wikimedia Foundation to help experienced editors review new pages on Wikipedia.

This project includes two main features:

  1. the New Pages Feed, a dynamic list of new pages for review by community patrollers; and
  2. the Curation Toolbar, an optional panel on articles that enables editors to get review them more effectively.

Test Objective

  • Test the New Pages Feed and the Curation Toolbar
  • Validate functions of Special:NewPagesFeed
  • Validate functions of Curation Toolbar
  • Validate documentation for the Page Curation process

Besides testing function, we are particularly interested in both UX and the documentation experience. Curation is available to both expert and new editors, and one critical aspect of this tool is to allow fairly inexperienced users to contribute at high level, so UX and documentation are highly important. For this test exercise, we envision the majority of testers having significant experience patrolling new pages, while a minority of experienced software testers play the role of new editors.

Test Approaches

While the New Pages Feed functions are pretty straightforward, there is a significant amount of functionality controlled by the Curation Toolbar. A purely functional evaluation of the system would be worthwhile.

At the same time, this tool is a bit different from the current New Page Patrol process, with the potential for confusion and conflict. Testing based on personas may be in order: what would happen if some experienced patrollers and some inexperienced patrollers are working the New Pages Feed at the same time?

Finally, the documentation for this system is all new as well. A close reading of the available documentation in comparison with the system itself would be useful.

Platforms and Browsers of Interest

We should focus our testing on these top browser versions:

  • IE 8+
  • Chrome 14+
  • Firefox 6+ (with and without the "HTTPS-Everywhere" extension)
  • Safari 4+ (only for desktop, not for IOS mobile platforms)

These should be tested on these desktop platforms:

  • Windows
  • Mac
  • Linux

We want to test all those browsers, both with and without "privacy/incognito" mode set.

Other platforms are not supported at this time for this project, including mobile browsers.

Pages:

Test environments:

http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed

http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed (possibly)

Production: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed

IMPORTANT: NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar on English Wikipedia is NOT a test system, it is being used for real patrolling. If you find a problem in a test system, it should be checked against the production system, but checked as unobtrusively as possible.


Software Elements Available in Special:NewPagesFeed

  • Filters
  • Sort
  • Refresh
  • Links
  • Stats

Software Elements Available in Curation Toolbar

  • Info
    • Problems
    • History
      • Link to full history
  • Wikilove
    • Editors
      • Sending wikilove may be disabled in test environments
  • Review/Unreview
    • "Learn more" link to documentation
  • Add Tags
    • Note: there are many many 'tags' available. applying a 'tag' will select a particular 'template' and apply that template as an edit to the page being curated.
    • This part of the Curation Toolbar is worthy of significant attention. However, many of the tagging templates don't work well on the current testing environments.
 Be sure to read the tags section of the help page for more information.
  • Mark for deletion
  • Next in queue
    • conflict/race here?
  • on/off via x and Toolbox
  • Note: Page Curation actions are being logged specifically, but there is no direct access to those logs from the UI - yet.

New pages should contain a NOINDEX tag Pages tagged with certain templates [NEED INFO] should also contain a NOINDEX tag. (NOTE: FEATURE SHOULD BE DISABLED AS OF AUG 16, NO IMMEDIATE PLANS TO ENABLE IT)

Compatibility with Special:NewPages (existing Patrolling action)

  • Ensure that when a page is marked as reviewed, it is also marked as patrolled (and vice versa)
  • Other features that require compatibility?

Background and Technical Resources