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Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Risks

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The following discussion is an archived proposal of the WikiProject below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.

The proposed WikiProject was not created. Closing stale proposal. There was some support a year ago for this, and most of the supporters remain active. If you wish to re-list the proposal or go ahead and create the project, be my guest. If you need help getting started, ping me or post on the proposals or WikiProject Council talk page. Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 18:48, 10 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Description

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Risk is both a set of concepts and phenomena, and an interdisciplinary field of study intended to better understand and communicate these concepts and phenomena. This wikiproject is intended as a place for interested editors to gather and to co-ordinate improvements in Wikipedia's coverage of these things.

In particular, it would be useful for Wikipedia to have a place where editors can co-ordinate efforts to more effectively and concisely convey the distinctions (or lack thereof) between risk and related concepts such as uncertainty; and between various different concerns or specialisations that fall under the umbrella of Category:Risk. This activity would include, for instance, finding relevant WP:RS, citing the relevant points, and updating relevant articles' ledes accordingly.

I understand that a WikiProject is a group of people, not a set of pages. However, pages are helpful for communication. To help communicate what I hope a WikiProject Risk's pages would look like, I started a userspace draft here. Zazpot (talk) 12:25, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

List of important pages and categories for this proposed group

List of WikiProjects currently on the talk pages of those articles
Please invite these and any other similar groups to join the discussion about this proposal. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory to find similar WikiProjects.
Why do you want to start a new group, instead of joining one of these existing groups?
Risk, as studied in academia and industry, is not the same subject as probability, or statistics, or actuarial science, or psychology. Instead, it is an interdisciplinary subject that draws upon, but is in other respects independent of, those (and other) disciplines. As such, there is no current Wikiproject suited to improving coverage of risk as a topic in itself, rather than as a tangential matter.

Support

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Also, specify whether or not you would join the project.

  1. Zazpot (talk) 12:25, 22 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  2. IveGoneAway (talk) 13:44, 23 April 2018 (UTC) would join the project[reply]
  3. SeraphWiki (talk) 13:39, 24 April 2018 (UTC) maybe[reply]
  4. — Charles Stewart (talk) 09:47, 18 May 2018 (UTC) would join[reply]
  5. Weak support. — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  21:42, 9 August 2018 (UTC) unlikely that I would join[reply]
  6. Maybe, but as "Risks". "Risk" is going to imply the board game to too many people, especially given that the dominant overall topic-space for wikiprojects is pop-culture material. More substantively, I'm a little concerned that this is too much of a catch-all, too much of an agglomeration of unrelated topics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:53, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Excellent point. Thank you. Zazpot (talk) 17:00, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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  • I feel like it should be "WikiProject Risk and Probability". — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  21:37, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    That could also work (I suggested "Risks" above).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:53, 10 November 2018 (UTC) On second though, "probability" is too broad.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:27, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for these good suggestions, Mr. Guye and SMcCandlish. Personally, I would prefer to avoid the term "probability" or any of the others that I distinguished from "risk" above (under "Why do you want to start a new group, instead of joining one of these existing groups?"). Other than that, I would be happy with either of those names for the WikiProject. Do you think a poll would be in order, to choose between them? Zazpot (talk) 17:00, 10 November 2018 (UTC); edited 13:01, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Nah, this page is a poll already; we can just continue discussing it (pinging previous commenters: @Zazpot, Mr. Guye, IveGoneAway, SeraphWiki, and Chalst:).

    A compromise naming option – given that the Risk and probability suggestion is trying to get away from a single word that might be ambiguous, to a name indicating a specific range of study/practice – would be Risk analysis. It's an entire category here and the subject of multiple discipline-specific articles, and seems to be the actual intended scope for the most part. It would obviate the vague concern I expressed above about scope. And it's broad enough that a few things that technically are outside it, either prerequisites of or results of risk analysis, or historical precedents, or tools of risk analysis but also tools of other fields, could still be considered within-scope for wikiproject purposes (direct analogy: the WP:WikiProject Cue sports project also includes both modern derived and ancient ancestral games without an actual cue stick, and video games that 3D-model pool, billiards, and snooker). Project scopes are not mutually exclusive.

    If peeps don't like Risk analysis, I would recommend the shorter title Risks, both for concision and because the probability-related articles declared to be within scope are so declared because they relate strongly to risk analyses, and say so in their leads. Probably hundreds of articles that relate to probability and statistical modeling in general were not listed, because they don't. "Probability" being added to the project name is likely too broad (or would often be interpreted over-broadly, even if the project page closely circumscribed the scope).

    At any rate, the proposal has been open since April and has already attracted more than average support for new wikiprojects in this day and age, so I don't think there's any issue with proceeding after a name is chosen. Nor does it seem an obvious case of "no, make this a taskforce/workgroup".

    PS: It seems most conventional to follow the "WP:WikiProject First second and third words" capitalization pattern. There are "WP:WikiProject Capitalize Like Mad" exceptions but they seem to be dwindling. Someone should probably mass-WP:RM them all in one direction or the other.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:27, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

    @SMcCandlish: many thanks for this thoughtful reply. I am mildly in favour of title case for titles (including for the titles of WikiProjects), but am not dogmatic about this, and otherwise agree with your comment above. I would be in favour of Risk Analysis or Risks or their lower-cased equivalents.
    The optimal approach seems to me to use "Risks" or "risks" for the WikiProject's title, and to open the WikiProject's home page with "WikiProject Risks exists to improve coverage of risk analysis on Wikipedia...". This attains a concise name and a clear purpose. What think you? Zazpot (talk) 13:33, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    That could work (and I think it would be "WP:WikiProject Risks" if using the short version; the first word after "WikiProject" always seems to be capitalized, to the extent anyone cares about non-reader-facing typography).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:42, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    re. renaming to Risk Analysis?: Risk is a quantity/attibute/parameter, while Risk Analysis is a process, the terms can not be interchangeable. Depending on the various practices, Risk Management is a process or system of processes of which Risk Analysis is one process, even if the definition of Risk Analysis is inconsistent. Solving the problem of inconsistent definitions of Risk across practices is needed to solve the problem of inconsistent definitions Risk Management Risk Analysis across practices, IMO. IveGoneAway (talk) 14:26, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    re. "WikiProject Risk and Probability": Probability covers so much that has little to with do Risk (in the Risk Management sense especially), even if Risk employs a some elements of Probability (I do not recall my Statistics classes discussing Risk, let alone management of Risk). IveGoneAway (talk) 14:09, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Why do you want to start a new group, instead of joining one of these existing groups?": Because all of these groups make use of the term Risk, but with a such a range of definitions and variations in practice that is has made for problems in having all of the practices share just one article. IveGoneAway (talk) 13:56, 11 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or at the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.
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