Talk:Growth/Revise Tone

The Growth team is in the early stages of this project, and we would greatly value your feedback:

• Do you think this would be a good task for newcomers?
• Could this be a helpful way for them to learn about Wikipedia’s policies while editing?
• How might we make this task easier to understand for newcomers?
• Do you anticipate any objections or concerns with releasing a feature like this?

KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:52, 4 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

• I would say it could be a good task, implementation with determine if it plays out that way
• Yes
• Unsure
• This experiment invites analysis about how many edits that get the suggested notice are revised to not include peacock words. One of the concerns will be changes that made the claims not include peacock words but are still non-neutral. This simply makes non-neutral content harder to find via semi-automated processes. How does the analysis plan to investigate this?

Czarking0 (talk) 22:33, 3 February 2026 (UTC) Reply

One thing your metrics don't seem to capture at all: when a passage contains this kind of inappropriate/subjective phrasing, it's often a signal that the entire passage — or even the rest of that editor's contributions — deserves closer scrutiny, not just a tone tweak.

By having newcomers make a "surface" correction (rephrasing the flagged sentence to sound neutral), this tool risks removing the very visibility cue that would have prompted someone to look more carefully at the passage. The underlying content can be completely unreliable or fabricated, but once the tone is smoothed over, it reads as calm and encyclopedic — and reviewers, bots, and future editors have far less reason to flag it.

In other words, "peacock" language is often a symptom, not the disease itself. Treating the symptom without investigating the cause could actually make bad content harder to detect, not easier — which is exactly how factually wrong material ends up sitting untouched for years. I'd be curious whether the team has looked at whether Revise Tone edits correlate with any change in downstream fact-checking, citation-check, or dispute-resolution activity on the same passages/articles, rather than only measuring completion rates and short-term revert rates.

Od1n (talk) 07:01, 16 July 2026 (UTC) Reply

There's a related set of discussions here: Wikipedia talk:Edit check/Tone Check. Dreamyshade (talk) 01:24, 17 July 2026 (UTC) Reply