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Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Technical standards

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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. It looks like there's not sufficient interest to support a WikiProject on technical standards at this time. To the nom, thanks for your efforts. If you find others interested in the topic, feel free to re-propose any time (either with a new proposal or just re-opening this one). Hope all are well. Ajpolino (talk) 14:29, 13 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Description

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The scope of this WikiProject is to discuss about, create and improve pages regarding technical standards (e.g.: ISO standards, IEC standards, pages about standards organisations, certification marks, etc.). Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 00:19, 12 August 2019 (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?
"Technical standards" is a multidisciplinary subject. Even if it looks a very wide subject, all of the standards have a lot of similarities; first of all, the ways they are created (what is called "standardization" process). For this reason, people having a different backgrounds could collaborate together efficaciously in order to create and improve the pages related to this WikiProject. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to found a single person or a single WikiProject that has enough competences to do it.

Support

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

  1. Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 00:19, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Good idea. I have help develop some of these standards and I would join the project. ~Kvng (talk) 18:09, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  3. sounds good. Daniele Pugliesi, Kvng, how is this going?--Sm8900 (talk) 23:18, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    How is what going? ~Kvng (talk) 23:21, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Kvng. I am simply asking how the initial proposal above is progressing, i.e., "The scope of this WikiProject is to discuss about, create and improve pages regarding technical standards (e.g.: ISO standards, IEC standards, pages about standards organisations, certification marks, etc.)."
if this is on hold, no problem. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 02:07, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Sm8900: I did not initiate this, I think that was Daniele Pugliesi ~Kvng (talk) 13:59, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Kvng and Sm8900: It looks there are some issues about this proposal at the moment, as you can read in the following comments. In my opinion, these issues could be solved, except maybe the number of contributors, that is very little (2-3). For an interdisciplinare Wikiproject, I think we need at least 10 active contributors or more. Probably we need some new contributor to join en.wikipedia to help this Wikiproject, but also in the case we could find some good new contributor, it takes time to understand Wikipedia rules and guidelines... Instead, I am thinking about to contact standard organizations to ask them to help us with their knowledge on standards (in other words, we could have some new contributors more involved in discussion and less on editing, so we concentrate on editing asking to them to solve any doubt on standards). What is yor opinion about it? --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 00:01, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Sm8900: I do standards work and have attempted to recruit participants to contribute to Wikipedia. When we do get such contributions there are sometimes WP:NPOV and WP:UNDUE issues because of COI and inexperience with Wikipedia. I think the contributions are a net positive as these issues can be addressed by improvements by more experienced, more neutral but less knowledgable editors. ~Kvng (talk) 14:30, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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I have a lot of ideas regarding things we need to do within a "WikiProject Technical standards":

  • Thousands of pages need to be created (e.g.: think to ISO standards, ASTM standards, IEC standards, pages about standards organizations, etc.)
  • The majority of pages about "technical standards" need sources
  • Maybe a lot of corrections has to be made
  • Proposing and assessing guidelines about technical standards pages (in order to speed up and simplify the creation of new pages)
  • Useful suggestions could arise from discussions with other users, e.g. how to organize pages about standards and standards organizations.

Unfortunately, I did not created a WikiProject on en.wikipedia before, so I will need the help of some user that has experience on it. On the other hand, I have a lot of suggestions and questions about technical standards, so I will help of course to propose and participate on new tasks and discussions. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 00:59, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • I'm neutral leaning a bit toward support on this one. The scope is arguably more important that many other projects on "literature", broadly defined. And as a "genre" (again broadly defined), this form of non-fiction is actually more consistent from work to work in many ways than average. It should also be able to attract a particular sort of careful and professionally experienced editor (versus, say, the average entertainment fan working on fantasy novels or shooter video games or dubstep or whatever, which is where most of our genre-/format-specific editing work goes). However, I think I would want to see more evidence of interdisciplinary support. Are there really enough editors who care about standards as such (regardless of their subject/content), versus editors who just care about particular standards because they're important to their individual livelihoods? For myself, I actually think I would participate in this to at least a minor extent if it were created (I do already intermittently work on some standards articles, and have built/improved various templates of use for their markup, though mostly with a WP-internal main intent, like writing template documentation or marking up guideline pages). For once, I can't really think of any way to merge this into another project as a taskforce/workgroup rather than have a stand-along project if there are enough editors for it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:47, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish: Thank you for your support.
Defining standards as "literature" sound strange for me... actually standards are based on "technical literature", but they are also practical. For example, standards about paper size (A3, A3, A2, etc.) are defined in what we can say is a "technical literature", but after this they are applied in practice in a so broad way that nowadays we can say 99,99999% of paper sheets are produced following this standard size. In analogous way, we can find standards in a lot of objects or in general things, procedures, etc. around us, also things we encouter in our every-day life, e.g.: screws, monitors, colours, metallic materials composition, electrical networks, file formats, etc... For this reason, theoretically a lot of old and new editors could contribute to this project, contributing in specific fields (e.g. an electrical engineer or technician could be more prepared on electrical standards, a IT engineer or technician in IT standards, and so on), while people expert or passionate in QHSE or other broader fields could help on definitions of general terms as "standard", "standardization", "certification", "audit", etc. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 23:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not against the creation of this project, but the statement that "Thousands of pages need to be created" sounds suspiciously like an intention to automatically create a large number of permastubs. Not every technical standard needs to have a Wikipedia article. I have seen a fair few deleted as non-notable at AfD. That kind of mass creation was done quite a lot in the past and has not always worked out too constructive. One example is astronomical objects, which has resulted in several waves of mass deletion. Another is geographic features—many stubs were auto-created from databases, some of them poor quality sources. There is a steady stream of of them put up for deletion at AfD every week. I'm not even convinced that a list of, say, ISO standards, or European standards would be a good idea. That's just us duplicating someone elses website (and we'll be out of date most of the time). Most standards would best just be mentioned on the subject page to which they relate. SpinningSpark 17:02, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Spinningspark: I do not want create "permastubs" neither to using any "mass creation" just to increase the number of pages. As explained to SMcCandlish, standards are eveywhere, also in our everyday life, and they play a very important role. Without standards, we could not contribute together to Wikipedia, for example (because of different operative systems, file formats and IT networks not compatible between them). My idea is to concentrate first of all on existing pages and on other important standards, if missed, than, continue to more specific standards. Also if we write millions of pages (not mass created), concentrating on the most important, it will probably less than 1% of all the encyclopedic standards. It looks strange, but actually standards number is huge and we can not figure out how many they are... just for IT sectors, we have a lot of file formats, and a lot related to electrical systems, and so on... Also if we write or improve 100 pages per each sector, there are so many sectors based on standards, so we reach 1000 of pages to create and improve very quickly.
    Regarding the sources, there are a lot of excellent sources, two of them are ISO and IEC. Regarding the risk of "duplicating someone elses website", our scope is different from ISO and other standards organization; for this reason, one page on Wikipedia about a standard can not be a "copy" of a page on website, first of all because we have to write each page in a way that is easy to understand and page content and style has be no promotional, so of course we can not duplicate. Anothere important difference with other webistes are wikilinks, that means we could for example talk about standards in a page related to "Screw", "Paper", "Steel", "Colour", "Quality", "Safety", "Environment", etc. This will help readers to understands for each product/process/etc. which standard applies, that in my opinion is a very important information. Lot of people probably does not know that a particular product is designed and build following a particular standard. In my opinioni this information can change dramatically the "meaning" of that product. For example, a TV build without following any standard is practically not useful.
    Regarding your phrase "we'll be out of date most of the time", in a certain sense you are right, but if we think in this way we do not have to write a lot of pages on Wikipedia (e.g.: sport pages, biographies of living people, etc.). --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 23:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Most of that TLDR post is responding to an argument I didn't make. I don't dispute for a moment the importance of standards; I have worked with standards for the whole of my professional career and well understand the role they play. What I do dispute is that the vast majority of standards are notable enough for their own page. Importance != notability. ISO and IEC may be excellent sources of information on standards, but they are worthless for establishing notability. As standards creating organisations they are not independent of the subject. To get my support for this project, there would have to be at least a couple of people involved who show an understanding of how notability works.
    On duplication, I was referring only to lists of standards, not standards articles in general. What value does List of ISO standards have for our readers that the ISO standards catalogue does not provide? SpinningSpark 12:14, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Your claim that TVs built without standards are not useful is ridiculous. There were no television standards when the first tellies were built. Always, the new technology comes first and the standards follow afterwards. SpinningSpark 12:14, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    I am not talking just about ISO/IEC standards or standards related only to TV, but also about "standards" in a general term (= rules followed by a companies in order to produce a mass production where every piece is equal or comparable with others) and standards for each component of TV (e.g.: screen size, resolution and shape, current voltage, plugs shapes, schemes adopted to build Cathode-ray tube, screws size, material composition, etc.). I can not imagine an electronic product where each component is not following any standard, because in that case those components could not be compatible each other, that means engineers has to issue too many problems in order to make the system to work as a whole, and the product in that case will be a single piece of "technology art", not replicable. When we start to replicate, at the same time we have a "standard". --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 20:45, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Abandoned WikiProjects are a problem. Proposed projects should have critical mass. If we have only two editors (Daniele Pugliesi me) expressing intent to work on this, I don't think it should be built. SMcCandlish and Spinningspark to you have any intent to contribute? ~Kvng (talk) 16:35, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Probably not. I've occassionally attempted to rescue these articles from deletion by researching sources, but I'm not really motivated to create any. My gut feeling is that only a small handful of standards have really substantial discussion in sources. Even for widely known standards like building regs and electrical installation that are used by tens of thousands of tradesmen, most of what is out there is not encyclopaedic discussion of the history and background of the standards. Rather it is just description of the contents. If these were works of fiction, we would call that in-universe. SpinningSpark 16:50, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • If are just two ones, I am not motivated, too. Standards is a very byg subject, so we need maybe at least 10 contributors to have a good interdisciplinary dialogue, and also with 10 contributors we can have problem to communicate, if each contributor has a different field of study/interest.
      • I do not think that content of these pages are limited to "description of the contents". In my opinion, each standards has a lot of encyclopaedic information related to his history and also a lot of statistics I think are encyclopaedic. By the way, thousands of pages related to standards are created yet, so the creation of new pages could be a secondary purpose of the Wikiproject. --Daniele Pugliesi (talk) 23:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        Yeah, my initial quasi-enthusiasm for the idea has waned. While I work on extant articles on standards and specs, I'm hard-pressed to think of a new article we need about one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:31, 23 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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