Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 4

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Peer review bot task

Hi, I ran a short task with MartinBotII, by way of testing, to add the WikiProject Military History peer reviews to the list. The bot was then reverted and the peer reviews removed. Now, I was under the impression that it was OK for us to list the peer reviews like this, and that there would be no change for WP:PR. Perhaps the problem was the sheer number of reviews added, or perhaps there are other process which take issue with this method. I was wopndering where we go from here? Martinp23 09:37, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I saw that - it did rather flood the central PR. Maybe you can get it to add only newly created PRs so the system is slowly phased in. Has anybody actually brought this up at WP:PR (asking because I'm too lazy to look at the talk page)? Yomangani^talk 10:33, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

No - not yet. It's relatively easy for me to get it to only list new PRs - but now I have to ask for a definition of new (at least to start with). How about those created within the last five days (or sooner??)? I'll be ready to put this fix in the bot in a few hours - currently it's running about 16000 or 17000 queries on wikipedia, but before I run it on PR again, I'd like to see us get permssion from them, if possible. Martinp23 10:58, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Since my message has been waiting long enough on WT:PR without response, I'm running the bot now. Only peer reviews transcluded on subscribing WikiProject peer review pages from after the current run will be automatically listed on the PR page (to avoid a flood). Thanks Martinp23 17:45, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, how often is the bot set up to run? Kirill Lokshin 19:26, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

It does a full check and will list any new peer reviews every hour (on the hour). Martinp23 19:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Ah, ok. It'll be interesting to see what happens with regard to the section heading difference once the two review types are listed on the same page; the project peer reviews typically create a new heading for each editor's comments, while the main peer review does not. Kirill Lokshin 19:36, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a note to say that any WikiProject which decide that they'd like to use this task should follow the following instructions:

1. Add {{WikiProject peer review a}} to every WikiProject peer review currently transcluded (if this is a big task, as me, and the bot can do it in exceptional circumstances)
2. Add {{WikiProject peer review}} to the WikiProject peer review transclusions page
3. That's it! It'll help me if you leave a short message on my talk page to let me know. Please be sure to make sure that step 1 is done before step 2, as this prevents us from flooding WP:PR! Thanks, Martinp23 15:38, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

A or GA

I am confused, between A and GA, what is better? Please advise. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 00:24, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

A-Class is higher in the scale than GA-Class. The extent to which there's a difference in practice varies depending on which project's assessments you look at. Kirill Lokshin 00:26, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Ganeshk (talk) 00:45, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

A little background: GA began after the A/B/Start/Stub and initially standards were fairly loose. Since then standards have tightened and most GAs are now pretty similar to A. Walkerma 17:47, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe you should just merge A and GA. Just H 01:49, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Many WikiProjects won't like that idea. Titoxd^(?!?) 02:38, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

While I'm not advocating abolishing it at all, is there any reason if an article has attained GA to even go for A? It would seem more logical to go the whole hog and go for FA straight from GA - although there may be exceptional cases I haven't thought of. Orderinchaos78 09:45, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I am just wondering, do you need to be a GA article in order to get to A. We are having a discussion on it on the comics rating page.Phoenix741 17:31, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

It's up to your project, really; but, generally speaking, no. Kirill Lokshin 17:51, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

So then shouldn't the order be like B, A, GA, then FA. I am asking this cause when i first saw the scale it looked as if A was higher then GA and if that is true, then all A articles should be GA articles, only a bit better. which is not the case for Comics's A articles. Phoenix741 17:55, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Nope. The order was originally B, A, FA, but then GA was shoehorned in; but a number of projects feel that the GA system is not reliable enough, leaving the requirement for a pre-FA level that the projects can use internally. Kirill Lokshin 17:57, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

wow ok, truthfully this system just seems way to confusing. and it seems that the GA has no meaning, but whatever, ty for the help.Phoenix741 18:01, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I equate GA to A. Some WikiProjects have A higher than GA. It really doesn't matter and its up to your WikiProject. GA does need to work on getting its credibility up but many are against any type of beaurocracy.--NMajdan•talk 15:21, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I think it's inappropriate to talk about "going from GA to A". An A-Class assessment not an "award" in the way GA or FA is; it is an internal judgement by a WikiProject that the article is pretty well written and complete. A GA or FA designation indicates that external reviewers judge that the article meets certain specific criteria. So A is internal, broadly defined; GA and FA are external and more sharply defined. Walkerma 17:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, by that standard, GA isn't much of an "award" either; and, in some cases, A-Class assessment is done rather more rigorously than the GA process. :-\ Kirill Lokshin 17:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Has anyone considered contacting the GA people and possibly suggesting a change? Maybe, like Military history is doing now, it could change the official designation to "A" and maybe require two reviewers, not one. Or maybe some other criteria could be used. It could still be a bit less rigorous than the FA standards, but could be changed so that either the GA or A status becomes unnecessary. Badbilltucker 18:46, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

That kind of defeats the purpose GA was supposed to serve, although that point has been lost somewhat. GA was initially a process whereby people just tagged or detagged articles they thought were or were not good. Overtime it has become more elaborate. There would be some opposition to establishing more rules around it, to be honest. Really, I'm not sure why we have it in the assessment queue, and my move would be to take it out. Hiding Talk 19:01, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

There is that discussion right now.--NMajdan•talk 19:02, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Space WikiProjects

Currently there are a number of Space-related wikiprojects (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Space/Projects for a list including number of members), and i thought it may be a good idea to somehow join them into Wikipedia:WikiProject Space, and divide them up as different task forces; the problem is, i don't know how conceivable this idea is.. 15 wikiprojects is a lot to merge, so it seems like a lot of work. what do you think the first step in this direction would be? start contacting them one at a time, saying "hey, do you guys wanna become a task force??" Mlm42 17:42, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Mmm, the first step should be setting up the Space project itself with all the infrastructure it needs to run as an umbrella project. Active projects are generally not going to want to become task forces of an inactive one.

Beyond that, I suggest proceeding slowly and with consideration for the feelings of the members of the sub-projects in question. :-) Kirill Lokshin 17:58, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

If you can think of something that would be offered by the umbrella project which is not offered by the majority of "child" projects (assessment, collaboration, and/or peer review come to mind immediately), while still allowing the child projects to operate largely independently, you might have a chance. Even there, you might want to consult the projects one at a time, and thus maybe get a good head of steam up before trying to get some of the larger existing projects to join. Badbilltucker 19:00, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

One way you could ease the other projects into this would be to still call them WikiProjects, but still move their pages as subpages. Then explain that the "parent" space is for them to use for cross-collaboration, such as template sharing, style issues that cross over more than once, etc. I think that would be an attractive enough benefit to not only organize them better, but wouldn't really require starting up a new project all by yourself. It doesn't really matter if we call them full projects or task forces, but as long as we have better cross-collaboration. Think of it like each WikiProject is an apartment to live in, and we've just moved them into the same apartment building. As long as the groups don't feel anything is being taken away, or demoted, then it should go pretty smoothly. A place for all space projects to cross-collaborate whenever they need to. -- Ned Scott 19:42, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Similar to the situation between WikiProject Tropical cyclones and WikiProject Meteorology. Meteorology is the parent project of Tropical cyclones, although TC is much older, much more organized, and is farther ahead on the curve than Meteorology, which is just gaining steam. However, there's still the recognition that TC is a "subproject" of Meteorology, although WPTC is completely independent of the other one. Merger talks are nowhere in the foreseeable future, but there's still a good degree of collaboration between the two. Perhaps that is a good approach to take initially, to try to attack the problem from a general, broad perspective (perhaps WP:SPACE would encompass broad articles such as Space?), then try to bring in projects as subprojects, then get them collaborating more with each other, and finally consolidating them as parts of the larger project. As long as there isn't a feeling of a hostile takeover, there shouldn't be any problems. Titoxd^(?!?) 21:16, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I think one difference here is that many of those subprojects are pretty inactive (last I looked at them - a few months back). They were very active 2-3 years ago then things died out. They (if anyone is still watching the pages) may be glad to consolidate activities into one broader project that is active rather than having lots of one-person projects.

As for the idea of projects working together, WP Chemicals (sub-project) and WP Chemistry (umbrella) do this well, I think. Chemicals was much more active last year, and Chemistry did very little, but many of the chemists naturally joined both. Nowadays both projects are roughly equally active, and Chemistry has begun things like a Collaboration - and last month's one was in effect a Chemicals article. The projects are semi-independent, but they share the same Chemistry template, and the assessments are all pooled together into one big "Chemistry article by quality" list (along with some other sub-projects like "Elements"). This hybrid model may work if the sub-projects are more active than I thought. Above all, though, keep things friendly, and things will work best that way! Walkerma 21:30, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

great, thanks for the input! i think, though, articles like Space are likely too broad, and the projects should be restricted to outer space.. but i have realised that even still, astrology would fall under that blanket. Mlm42 09:59, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

How does one delete a project?

A single purpose account User:TriviaGood has created a project (Wikipedia:WikiProject Trivia) to protest a real project (Wikipedia:WikiProject Trivia Cleanup). This seems to me to not only violate WP:POINT but to be at cross purposes with WP:AVTRIV, WP:TRIVIA, WP:V, WP:OR, WP:WAF, and WP:EPISODE. I've tagged it prod for speedy delete but I'm not sure if that is the proper way to go about it. Would someone be so kind as to give me a little direction here. Thanks and cheers. L0b0t 22:17, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion is what you're looking for, I believe. EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:24, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Done and done. Thank you very much for the help. Cheers. L0b0t 22:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

No problem. EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:50, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Titles and capitalization!

Do normal article naming rules apply to WikiProjects? Would, for example, a "WikiProject Giant Robots and Colossal Monsters" be a bad idea? (Not the concept, the capitalization!) -ryand 15:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, they do. I think that one might be a bad idea on both counts, but that's just me. :) Badbilltucker 15:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

The convention that I'm aware of is to consider "WikiProject" a pseudo-namespace and put everything after it in sentence case; thus, "WikiProject Giant robots and colossal monsters". There are some exceptions to this, though; I've seen a few projects go for full capitalization. It's not really a big deal either way. Kirill Lokshin 16:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Aw, damn. Thanks! -ryand 16:58, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject

just something to point out. I don't think it is such a good idea in the template to use User:Name as an example as they have been blocked indefinately for vandalism a while ago. Simply south 20:36, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Multiple importance rankings in a project banner?

User:Kusma, a highly-regarded (by me, anyway) admin and right now the driving force behind WikiProject Germany, has asked me if there is any way to set up a project banner so that it can display two different "Importance" rankings, on for the parent project and one for the newly-created Mainz task force. Personally, I don't know if it can be done, and certainly don't know how to do it. If anyone does, I would be fawningly grateful for the information. :) Badbilltucker 17:48, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

It's pretty trivial if you add a second importance parameter (e.g. "importance-mainz"); then you can just copy over the existing importance-rendering code into the #if: block for the task force. Kirill Lokshin 18:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Er, I already have implemented the secondary importance level, see Template:WikiProject Germany. I just need help getting the subproject article categories parsed by a bot :-) Kusma (討論) 19:02, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, you need to create all the possible categories, and nest them under something like Category:Mainz articles by importance and Category:Mainz articles by quality, just like what happens with the main project. Kirill Lokshin 19:06, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

New vague proposal

It has recently occurred to me just how many projects are out there, and how we might be facing either direct conflicts between projects and other wikipedia content issues, and might be better able to coordinate activity so that content and related issues could be more harmoniously handled. On that basis, I have today created what is probably a truly goofy proposal at User:Badbilltucker/Internal organization structure regarding how I think we might be able to address some of these concerns. As stated there, I welcome any responses, and recongize up front that the majority of them may well be on the negative side. Please criticize it or praise it as fully as you wish. Thank you. Badbilltucker 14:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

It's a pretty good idea, actually. I see three major issues that need to be considered, though:

• The existence of project coordinators is not something that can really be assumed throughout. While I would argue (obviously) that they're useful—at least in very large projects—they are also viewed with disfavor by people who regard the idea as overly hierarchic and bureaucratic. I suspect that a push to create them across the board would be heavily resisted; and, in any case, they're not likely to be very useful for small projects.
• Some of the top-level projects (the one of particular interest to me being WikiProject History) are obviously nonfunctional, at this point; based on my experience, I suspect that this problem is a fundamental one when dealing with a too-broad scope. I don't know to what extent a practical hierarchy at that level would be helpful; it may be better to stop the organization (or its practical aspects, in any case) at the next tier down.
• There's no mention of task forces; they tend to make things considerably simpler, as they institute an explicit hierarchical organization, and prevent narrow "sub-projects" from being left off with no attention from their parents.

(On a side note: a thousand WikiProjects?!) Kirill Lokshin 17:56, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I was actually taking task forces into account, implicitly, as being basically separate projects. I guess I would think of any task forces as being children of the main project as well as, potentially, of any other applicable projects (like maybe national projects when dealing with Military history task forces). Also, like in the case with the new (maybe?) resuscitated WikiProject Religion, I think that maybe the other "umbrella" projects might be workable if they somewhat limited their current focus to general subject-related matters and those areas not explicitly covered elsewhere. History, for example, could cover the article History, Revisionist history, Lost History, Pseudohistory, and other pages which do not fall within the scope of any children projects, and probably at least geologic history and most of African history, both of which I think are currently orphan subjects. Of course, such umbrella projects would also have their own membership, such as it is, and any other individuals interested could take part in any discussion on their project pages. So, in the event that there is no coordinator, like in a one or two person project, any interested and informed member of the project could be bold and appoint themselves, like is currently done with a lot of the featured article removal discussions. I honestly don't know whether turning a project like History into one more focused on the areas of history which do not fall under the scope of any existing project would work or not, although I wound tend to think it would to at least a certain degree. I have made another rather vague proposal on their talk page to this effect. And, yes, at leat count, counting task forces and inactive projects, it's a bit over 1100 (I came up with 1,104) total. Badbilltucker 18:48, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

What about this for vague and controversial? More actively integrating descendant WikiProjects into parent ones as task forces. I don't know if this is completely doable (ie - making every TV show-centric WP into a task force for WP Television), but in other cases such as the multiple clinical medicine projects, it might be for the best. On the other hand, having task forces for individual shows within WP TV probably isn't a bad thing either, as the task force page can more or less function identically to the current WP page.

The only difference is that integrating projects as task forces under a larger project allows there to be more editorial and stylistic consistency, as well as preventing projects with similar types of content having to re-invent the wheel when project-wide or supra-project issues may occur. For example, the various Film WikiProjects ultimately are expected to conform to the style guidelines set down by WikiProject Films. What does being a WikiProject allow them which being a task force of WP Films does not? As a task force, they can still have their own pages and largely their own autonomy, while being connected to a larger resource of people (thus advertising their task force's work better).

I submit that we should consider actively promoting more WP migration to task forces. It also increases the membership of the larger projects, which (hopefully) will allow them to become stronger and more useful. We don't need more or less WikiProjects, but we can certainly use more excellent ones! Girolamo Savonarola 19:11, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I actually like the proposal above a lot, and tried to get one project Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Virginia, to do just this when it was put up for deletion. I think the problem is the emotionalism which goes into the foundation of new projects, and the factor that some people really, really like to describe themselves as founders of projects. Not that I can think of anyone in particular who does this, of course :) . But I do think, at this point, such reorganization will only happen after we get all the projects talking to each other, not before. Badbilltucker 19:22, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

What's so wrong with being the founder of a task force? :) None of us are Jimmy Wales (Jimmy excepted), so there's not much glory in trying to plant flags, AFAIK. After all, all (non-WP:NOT) articles fall under the scope of Wikipedia! As far as getting the projects talking...isn't that partially what this place provides? A neutral ground for projects to discuss such things? I'm not saying that our scope explicitly involves dispute resolution - at least not any more than any other WikiProject would regarding the articles within it. But IIRC, surely this was one of the establishing points of WP Council? to act as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration, as the project page says... Girolamo Savonarola 19:30, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. As a practical point, though, the first targets for absorption into task forces should likely be projects that are inactive, as they're generally quite easy to deal with. Once those are cleaned up, we'll be in a much better position to figure out how to shuffle around the groups that are actually doing something. Kirill Lokshin 19:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

About the UVA project...where would you propose nesting the task force? Under WikiProject University or Wikipedia:WikiProject Virginia? I certainly think that both should link it, but as discussed previously regarding WP Indian cinema, I believe that the UVA project has more in common, editing-wise, with the other university projects. Task forces should probably be located within their content parent, not their geographic one (unless the two are substantially the same). Girolamo Savonarola 19:47, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I actually proposed both to the originiator of the project, favoring WikiProject Virginia because it has a red-link section on its project page dealing explicitly with education. Also, it seems to me that the people in a particular state might be more familiar with a school than someone across the continent who belongs to the "proper" parent project. Either would work, of course. Badbilltucker 19:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, as I mentioned above, WP Virginia could still of course retain linkage to the task force (including listing it as one of their task forces too). I'm just saying that, for organization and consistency, the UVA project should be an explicit task force subsection of WP Uni. As many other projects as desire can still also claim it as a task force and link to it, so long as the actual task force is located within WP Uni. That's my proposal. Just keeps the hierarchy easier and more consistent.

I'm going to start looking into the WP Directory as I have time and draw up a list for discussion of inactive projects which can either be task forced or merged. Would anyone have any objections? Girolamo Savonarola 19:59, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

None from me! :) Badbilltucker 20:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. The UVA project has been recently restored/recreated/whatever through Deletion review, as the creator wasn't willing to let it die and requested its reinstatement. Badbilltucker 20:28, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe we should create a place of discussion for small Wikiprojects merging into parent WikiPorjects. Maybe like WP:RM. NauticaShades 07:16, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

"Authority" of wikiprojects

Do wikiprojects have the authority to set guidelines for articles within their subject area? Assuming they do, can they set guidelines that are exceptions to, or in conflict with overall wikipedia guidelines? --Milo H Minderbinder 17:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I would say no, they have no authority whatsover to contravene established policies and guidelines. That is a very slippery slope to tread as we already have users claiming that their particular pet television show articles should not have to cite sources and can be chock full of trivia and cruft. Cheers. L0b0t 17:55, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I recall having this same discussion on WP:VP recently, so I'll just copy the comments I made then:

Broadly speaking, a WikiProject's guidelines get their "power" from the fact that the members of the project—who are generally a large portion of the editors in a particular area—are presumably supporting them, not because of some partiular official status of the project itself. While WikiProjects shouldn't be coming up with things that conflict with major policies, I see nothing wrong with developing exceptions/special cases/etc. to issues of formatting, layout, usage, and so forth for particular areas where the Wikipedia-wide guidance may not make sense; this happens quite often, and is generally entirely uncontroversial.

A WikiProject's guidelines are meaningful because they (presumably) represent a consensus of editors working on some particular topic. This is not to say that WikiProjects can do unreasonable things; but, if the editors who are actually writing articles on X decide that some section of the MoS doesn't make sense for those articles and come up with a reasonable alternative, I see no reason to reject it out of hand because the MoS is "more official" than the WikiProject. Kirill Lokshin 18:08, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I would opine that WikiProjects establish conventions rather than guidelines. If these conventions are in contradiction to the MoS, then the MoS should trump them, unless they decide to bring the conventions to MoS as a proposal. This isn't particularly uncommon. Girolamo Savonarola 18:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Meh. That'll just bloat the MoS with dozens of obscure special cases, the vast majority of which will be entirely uncontroversial.

The entire dispute from which this issue arises is something of a bizarrely degenerate case, actually; most of the time, the issue of which guideline is better doesn't come up, because the WikiProject's guideline/convention/whatever is clearly seen to be more reasonable than the "official" one. The issue here is that there's (a) no consensus among different WikiProject in an area and (b) strong feeling from outside the WikiProjects that the WikiProject guidelines are unreasonable. Kirill Lokshin 18:31, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

• As a consequence of our structure, there is no such thing as "jurisdiction" on Wikipedia. Therefore a WikiProject cannot claim jurisdiction over the articles in its topic area, nor claim immunity to existing policies and guidelines. Obviously WikiProjects are given large leeway to write the articles in their topic area, and several broad guidelines (especially naming conventions) have been established by WikiProjects and expanded in scope. But since Wikipedia runs on the principle of consensus, a consensus within a small group of people cannot override a consensus within a larger group, or that of Wikipedia as a whole. For instance, if a WikiProject on <some game> decides it's a good idea to use colorful words in mid-prose (and yes, that has happened) and the rest of Wikipedia says that looks ugly and unreadable (and runs counter to the MOS, for that matter), the project does not get to keep their funky colors. (Radiant) 18:35, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
  • True, that. (Keep in mind, though, that consensus can be formed in different places, and isn't necessarily limited by the role of those. In other words, a consensus of three people on some obscure MoS page doesn't automatically carry more weight than a consensus of thirty people on a WikiProject page.)
  • But, broadly speaking, most (serious) WikiProjects tend to be reasonable, and, as a consequence, most (serious) WikiProject guidelines are followed no differently from other guidelines in practice. Kirill Lokshin 18:41, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

• If there are a lot of subject-specific guidelines, I think it's appropriate (in fact, very good) for a project to give it's own guidelines - for example for chemical compounds we use this style guide. There's no need to clutter up the main MoS, and I believe it's linked from the main MoS section on chemistry. However, nothing in there contravenes the main MoS - as stated above, the main MoS should normally trump anything produced by a WikiProject. Walkerma 20:30, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Many WikiProjects use de facto style guidelines when the MoS is undefined or simply when there are good reasons to ignore it. (After all, the MoS is a guideline, and not policy). The MoS's purpose is to try to maintain consistency within Wikipedia; consistency within a topic is relevant as well, but as long as a WikiProject's guidelines are not drastically different from Wikipedia guidelines, these "violations" are just not controversial. Titoxd^(?!?) 20:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

• Since we appear to be in agreement, and there has recently been confusion on the issue, maybe we should consider adding a few words among these lines to Wikipedia:Wikiproject? (Radiant) 09:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Where I've seen a few problems is not with the style and formatting of articles, but with individual WikiProjects wanting to go their own way with templates, categorizdation, etc. One topic that seems to get rehashed occasionally is the relationship between the Stub-Sorting WikiProject and other WikiProjects. I haven't seen any problems lately, but I haven't paid that much attention to the WSS lately. ^BlankVerse 12:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

There has been one complaint recently about the stub-sorting project. Personally, I think that, in this particular case, the complaint is less than well-founded. I can see how it might be beneficial if some projects whose scope covers matters of vital importance to a variety of other projects were to be in some way more accountable or responsive to other projects. Unfortunately, like in this particular space, I can't see how to in any way actively enforce that without serious and probably counterproductive changes to the existing structure. Badbilltucker 14:47, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity Learning projects

I think Wikipedians who are interested in WikiProject Council will also be interested in creating a similar things for Learning projects in Wikiversity. Join us in Wikiversity. Srinivasasha 02:55, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Signpost

So, what do we want to do with this page? Last time I checked, I thought we were going to do an internal newsletter (a la WP:MILHIST, WP:BEATLES and WP:WPTC) but it seems that the page was created as part of a dispute currently on WP:RFM. So, do you guys want to start an internal newsletter? What content should we have, if we decide to have one? Titoxd^(?!?) 01:34, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

First off, what is going on with this edit warring? I have no idea what the controversy even regards. Thanks, Girolamo Savonarola 01:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

What I understand is that Nathannoblet was using the page as a sandbox for work in the Wikipedia Signpost, then Ral315, the Signpost's editor, rejected it. Then Nathannoblet filed an RFM, as can be seen on Ral315's talk page. But that doesn't tell us what to do with the page in this project space: do we nuke it, or do we just use it for something else? Titoxd^(?!?) 01:53, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd say nuke it. It's just the latest in a string of troublesome contributions by Nathannoblet.--cj | talk 17:13, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Getting rid of it seems to be the best approach. (Which is not to say that either a newsletter, or a way of getting WikiProjects featured in the Signpost, would be bad ideas; but this isn't a working version of either.) Kirill Lokshin 00:49, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Newsletter collection

Since many wikiprojects are releasing newsletters G-hits, wouldn't it be a good idea to gather them all to one page (say under WikiProject Council). This would help outsiders (relative to the project) to see what's going on with wikiprojects, and maybe get them interested in some projects. The page could be a overview of new newsletters published in one month (or depending on the volume). Usable idea? Doable? Ideas? feydey 03:35, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Maybe that would be a good use for the page being discussed above... Titoxd^(?!?) 06:47, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I got BOLD and edited the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Signpost page as I described. Comments? Feel free to rv. if needed. Also wikiprojects can be notified to deliver their newsletters straight to the page. Still the current name "/Signpost" for the subpage doesn't really describe the content? Suggestions? feydey 20:57, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

• I like the idea a lot. I would like it even more if it could include info on the new projects or sub-projects created or re-energized since the last edition. I'd love it if it could have some sort of automatically generated content included, like a list of GA and FA promotions and demotions of the past month, and maybe a link to a list of the existing portals. If it could be done on a regular basis, though, we'd need quite a few contributors from a lot of different fields coming in to update it regularly. I think having it made maybe bi-monthly would be the best way to go for regular updates, since that would allow some of the contributors time to do other stuff too between issues. As for the title, what sort of documents do "councils" get? Maybe a Council Briefing? Badbilltucker 21:13, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Actively recruiting new members of the Council?

For the newsletter collection to work best, I would think we want to ensure that each of the larger projects, and maybe most of the smaller ones, have a member or two who are specifically requested to add updates to it. To do so, these people would probably be optimally members of the Council. Does anyone think we should try to actively recruit such members from as many projects as possible? Badbilltucker 22:11, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Sports Family Categories

I have been looking at categories more closely recently. Today, I decided that there are a lot articles that would be more easily navigated if we developed a Sports family hierarchy (in Category:Families). I have started to fill in what I could not find out there in the section that follows: User:TonyTheTiger#Categories_Created. Can you tell me if anyone at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Directory/Culture/Sports would be interested in getting involved in Sports family categorization or if there is a good way to proceed in such an endeavor.

I'm not sure that there is an easy answer here. The people who would be in the best position to help you would probably be at Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Sports and games, given the scope of their group. I can personally see the value of having such categories, but they are probably the group most directly and closely involved in these articles, and would probably be best able to give you any assistance. Badbilltucker 18:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

New bot available to help wikiproject members

Hi, my bot PockBot has recently been authorised for use. It is a tool I developed primarily with a view to helping wikiproject members better manage parts of their project.

The bot runs for any given category and returns a list of all articles in that category, as well as the current status of each article (ie FA, stub, start etc). I hope the potential benefit of this bot is clear in helping those trying to keep tabs on the status of articles within categories relevant to their wikiprojects. For example, for the wiki military history project, classical warfare task group, the bot ran a list of every article under the category (and all sub-categories) of Category:Military of ancient Rome.

I am not sure of the correct and efficient to publicise the availability of this bot to help out wikiproject members. Can anyone advise? - PocklingtonDan 10:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

New Template

I've created Template:Subprojects for use on WikiProjects pages. How should I tell them? It looks like this:

Adam Cuerden ^talk 01:00, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Uh, I'm not very technically "ept"... How does it work? - AdelaMae ^{(t - c - wpn)} 01:21, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Just add {{Subprojects}} to any WikiProject page. It handles the title, et al, and then, using the edit button on it, you can change the listing. It's based off the To-do boxes. I'm probably going to change it from Subprojects to Work Groups or suchlike, since it was originally intended to house current projects of WikiProject Opera. There's a couple extra features: can change the image in the corner, might add more, but I've set it up to be as much as possible functional without tweaking. Adam Cuerden ^talk 01:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Oh, duh... I missed the edit button. I saw the bit about changing the image, though. Thanks! - AdelaMae ^{(t - c - wpn)} 01:29, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't like it. It's quite crude, visually; and quite redundant, as most (all?) projects that have such structural features already use a real navigational template for them. (More generally, full-width boxes should be used sparingly, as they're visual overkill in most cases.) Kirill Lokshin 02:04, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

It isn't full width. In my opinion, it's hardly "crude" either. Mike Dillon 02:09, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

It's certainly full-width in the sense that there can't be anything else next to it on the page. (The crudeness is, admittedly, a matter of personal opinion.) Kirill Lokshin 02:12, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I thought you meant 100% width. Mike Dillon 02:19, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Weel, the project I made it for wanted something to expand functionality of the Template:to do (Wikipedia) they were using, so I gave them this and a auto-updating monthly project banner in the same style (with a talk-page interface for setting up the next few projects. Thought it might be useful for other medium-sized projects. Adam Cuerden ^talk 18:55, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Top Ten

I accidentally posted this to the directory subpage as well. Sorry. Is it possible, or a good idea, to create a Top Ten or Twenty list of Wikiprojects? My recent efforts on WP:LGBT have been fuelled mainly by what I could find on WP:BIO, WP:MILHIST, and WP:COMICS, because these are the ones I saw mentioned as being amongst the biggest and most successful projects. A list of the largest projects would surely be useful to founders of fledgling projects looking to expand. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 11:27, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

We all make mistakes, and this was nowhere near a big one, if it honestly qualifies as a mistake at all; don't worry about it.:) It certainly might make sense to list the projects which have the most development in the Project Guide, particularly for those projects which believe that they themselves might have need in the future for such a large and complicated organization. I guess I would maybe appreciate some input from the others as to where and how, probably in the Guide, we would list such larger projects whose work is particularly effective. Badbilltucker 16:44, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Would be an interesting thing to do, but I have no idea how to do select the list without being entirely subjective. Anyone want to compile some sort of useful statistics on the various WikiProjects we could use? Kirill Lokshin 17:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I think the ones that would be most useful would be the ones that do all the three main actions (assessment, peer review, and collaboration), and possibly have official or unofficial subgroups as well. The ones that come to mind immediately are Biography, Military History, India, and Australia, but I know there are other groups as well. As I'm going through the Project Directory to add the recent additions now, I should be able to do this at around the same time and report back either today or tomorrow. Badbilltucker 18:18, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest that peer review be replaced with number of members. A WikiProject may have all the accoutrements of a big WikiProject, but is useless without anyone to run them... Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 18:39, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I think all four mentioned above qualify as having a substantial number of members, particularly counting all their official and unofficial subjprojects. And I wasn't thinking of trying to create a list of projects by number of members, or anything like that, because those numbers change so often that it would probably be outdated by the end of the day, particularly with existing members creating sockpuppets to get their own project numbers up, something I see as being a virtual certainty in at least some cases. And, of course, there are projects where people sign in just to officially be a member and never edit a single article thereafter, as well as cases of people who may have joined a project years ago, died within the week, and still remain listed as members of the project because no one took their names off. But those four are among the projects with the most members and the most complex structures. I think Germany qualifies as well, and maybe now Cats (with Cat breeds evidently having been absorbed when I wasn't looking), but those four or more (possibly including others) should be enough to give any other projects a rough idea of how a larger, more complicated project manages to continue to function. Badbilltucker 00:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Raw numbers of members is a bad idea IMHO - I have seen some projects that have a lot of members listed yet they are inactive, and others that were very active and successful with only 2 or 3 members. The talk page of a project can give some idea if read critically - but even there, activity isn't always a good guide. Some projects will be very "inward looking" - endlessly debating whether the Series 5 Weapons infobox should be blue or read, while not taking much interest in what happens outside their project - they will typically not have good practices to follow. Good parameters to consider IMHO:

• FAs (and to a lesser extent, GAs) from a project, particularly those that were written as a collaborative effort by the project.
• A "Collaboration of the XXX" that is active and successful
• Clear goals or active ToDo list
• Collaborative work on setting standards & policies - subject-specific citation guidelines, style guides, image guidelines and the like - a project that can produce "mature" information like this is usually pretty active and working well together.
• An absence of name-calling on the project talk pages!

Not easy to use for giving us a top ten, but may be helpful. Walkerma 02:49, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

These are all fine and good, but as this will have to be somewhat subjective at the end of the day, let's not dance around it. Why not simply list projects by consensus agreement of WP Council members that they are good example projects? At least then we can cite the nomination and support (or lack thereof) and debate each project being added on a case-by-case basis. Isn't that the wiki way? :) Girolamo Savonarola 09:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Yep, sounds fine to me! Walkerma 15:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me too. One additional comment. I've heard that Esperanza is intending to hold some sort of Appreciation Week in maybe January. I know this might be kind of controversial, but what would the rest of you think of maybe giving out a sort of "Project of the Year" award during this Appreciation Week, listing at least several of the top projects as nominees, and maybe awarding winner status to those projects which have clearly been most productive/successful during the past year. If we wanted to get carried away with ourselves, we might even create two different ones, one for the larger projects and one for the smaller projects, so that the most successful smaller projects could be recognized as well. Badbilltucker 16:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Unless the appreciation week is Wikipedia wide, I wouldn't advocate getting involved with it. Getting involved with Esperanza makes the Council look bad. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 19:02, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking something more akin to featured status (though not equivalent) - simply that projects can be nom'd and also denom'd at will, and chosen by group consensus. The major difference would be that it would solely be a mark of distinction, and therefore there would be no comments or suggestions - a project either would be regarded as exemplary or not. And of course, this could always be rescinded should someone de-nominate it. The only intention here is to collate the projects which best serve as examples for up and coming WikiProjects. As projects are constantly in flux (and are expected to be), a non-equivalence to featured status needs to be emphasized. Keeping this to a limited and practical number is therefore important. Girolamo Savonarola 19:22, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

No objections to what Girolamo Savonarola said above. I can well see how having such examples available would make it easier for someone looking to found a new project to have a good example of what works. I only mentioned the Appreciation Week proposal because one of the proposals regarding it is that it be kind of the annual awards program for all of wikipedia, with any projects or other groups who wish to do so appearing to present awards to the members or others that they believe merit receiving them. I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone who reads this know that, particularly if they haven't already heard of the proposal. It also already has one specific award for a kind of "Wikipedian of the Year" award, and I was just thinking that a "Project of the Year" award might also be somewhat appropriate. (Kind of like "Best Actor" and "Best Movie" awards, as it were.) However, I still think that the decision regarding who should be considered for being an examplar project/featured project should take place whether Esperanza does what they might be planning or not. Maybe jumping the gun a little bit here, but I'm starting a page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Exemplar Projects where we can have the members, I hope, discuss which projects would deserve consideration for this recognition and why. I think it would probably function best if it were done like some of the existing projects, like WikiProject Novels, are currently doing to determine which articles will be recognized as being of top-importance to their project. Exactly how to determine when consensus is reached is probably difficult, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Badbilltucker 19:38, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

New WProj-oriented Category & Category talk header templates

I'd found Template:CatDiscuss and Template:CatMaintain and (aside from they seem to be named backwards) wasn't entirely happy with them for WProj purposes. So for your WikiProjectifying pleasure:

• Template:CatMaintainPageWP
• Template:CatMaintainTalkWP

These can come in handy for when your project is overhauling a messy bunch of categories, or if people keep doing boneheaded things in them even after you've cleaned it up. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 12:34, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Mmm, the text there might be a little too WP:OWNy to work well, though. Kirill Lokshin 18:11, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Project banners and actors

Should an actor have a project banner with class/importance ratings? I was thinking no, because then some pages would be completely cluttered with banners, but then I've come across some actor articles with them. Thanks, RHB 22:23, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan does that for the Victorian actors under their scope, but modern actors... perhaps not so much. Adam Cuerden ^talk 00:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what's being asked. Is the banner about the actor specifically? In most cases, a WikiProject based around a single actor wouldn't be viable anyways. Or are these articles about actors being assessed by other WikiProjects (e.g. Film or Biography)? In that case, I don't see anything particularly special about them; actor articles get normally assessed just like articles on any other topic.

(In any case, most of the WikiProject banners now suport the "small=yes" option for really cluttered talk pages, if that's the only concern.) Kirill Lokshin 00:39, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure either. I know of no specific project which focuses on a single actor, so I have to assume that the banner in question is one of a project like Biography or Film which feels the article to fall within their scope. Also, I suppose Christopher Reeve could fall within the scope of the WikiProject Superman, Basil Rathbone within the scope of WikiProject Holmes and some other specific similar situations, but I couldn't really object to seeing them included in the those categories as they are significant to that project. It would help to know what specific articles and banners are being referred to. Badbilltucker 15:45, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

new project/revived project

I've revived WikiProject Climbing over at WP:CLIMBING. However it's a relatively broad topic and I have never created a wikiproject before so I could use some help on the technical aspect of things. If anyone has some free time (bwahaha, no really), I'd appreciate it if you stopped by and lent a hand. ⇒ SWATJester ^{On Belay!} 11:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

The thoughts that come to mind are:

(1) Did you mean bi-monthly or semi-monthly collaboration? It's hard to tell from the text. Bi-monthly generally means every two months, semi-monthly twice a month.
(2) You might want to list the project on Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals before you start the project in earnest, maybe waiting for at least five members to join. That's generally enough to indicate that the project would be viable.
(3) There are a variety of other suggestions available in the WikiProject Guide, which was written by the developers of the more successful projects in wikipedia. It would probably be a very good idea to review it and see if any of the suggestions included could be applied to your project.
That's about all I can think of. I hope anyone who thinks of anything else feels free to add their comments as well. Badbilltucker 14:53, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

One single Project newsletter for all the projects?

Yeah, I know that this has kind of been addressed above. But I noticed that User:Nathannoblet recently created an "alternative" to the Signpost. It really hasn't gotten much support, and was in fact nominated for deletion. But it did make me think of the idea of a single, unitary, project update notice. If you look at them all, many/most of the individual project newsletters begin to look more or less the same after a while. Does anyone think it might be a good idea to perhaps issue one regular "Project Post" (or whatever) which would discuss the major developments in all of the projects collectively. The things that I think would most likely be included would be the featured and good content raised up over the past month, the new projects and task forces developed in the past month, one or a few articles about certain specific projects, and a kind of letters/open forum section. Maybe it could be constructed along the lines of an average portal. I think that doing so would have a few advantages:

• (1) The individual projects won't be committed to repeating themselves; if nothing new happened, they don't have to do anything,
• (2) The newer projects and work groups will get some more attention than they otherwise might,
• (3) it would offer the members of the various projects a forum to discuss matters of importance to more than one project, possibly including proposed mergers and other topics.

Anyway, any and all feedback would be more than welcome. Badbilltucker 13:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

As a quick aside, Nathan is currently blocked for a month and there is a discussion going on now for an indef block. See this discussion for details on the current and proposed blocks.

In general terms, I think an overall WikiProject newsletter could be useful, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's needed for discussing article quality promotion. If such a newsletter is launched, I would think that it should deal with project administration news; items like updates to the assessment procedures and associated bots (like the backup that Oleg's doing nightly in case the bot goes wonky) or interproject relationships (like the discussion a while ago on subprojects and task forces) would be entirely appropriate here. Slambo (Speak) 18:19, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

The article quality promotion was really only indicated to (1) let projects show off recent work and (2) let people know exactly which articles have been promoted to maybe help keep an eye on them and possibly, for good articles, improve them further. Right now, I know of no official list of recently promoted good articles (of course, I don't actually know much anyway), and, as many projects do keep tabs of how their articles are doing, it would be useful. I know how difficult it has been for me to keep track of how many new good articles are determined, and figured it might be useful to other projects too. Badbilltucker 19:02, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, you might not have seen these then... Content promoted to Featured status is listed weekly on the Signpost under Features and admins (current column) and also on Wikipedia:Goings-on (WP:GOON) which also lists the current collaborations. Near the top of the GA page is a short list of recently promoted articles in that process. Slambo (Speak) 19:11, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Only the GA page is not updated automatically, and most users forget to update the blurb near the top, so it isn't very reliable. Titoxd^(?!?) 18:36, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Separate page for Participants

Would anyone oppose to that? I want to also organize out the specific field of every participants, so that it makes easier for anyone that want to seek specific assistance in a area. AQu01rius (User &#149; Talk) 18:54, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

I have no problems with it. If you're going to be fiddling with the list anyways, you might want to look at figuring out some standard way of linking to WikiProjects there (as just about everyone has formatted the links differently). Kirill Lokshin 18:56, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Only comment I might have is some people belong to several projects, with some only minimal involvement in some with major involvement in others. I would love to see maybe at least one link listed to every project that has a member who is also in the Council, but think in some cases listing all of a persons membership might be somewhat of a disadvantage. Badbilltucker 19:29, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Such a page has been started at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Contacts. All members should feel free to add their names to the list if they count themselves a primary contact for a given project. Also, if there is someone outside of the Council who serves as a primary contact for a given project, members should feel free to contact that person to add their name to the contact list, as well as to join the Council if they so desire. Come the end of December, I will be contacting the various projects which do not yet have listed "contacts" to ask them which member should be listed. Badbilltucker 17:42, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

A query on WikiPrject proposals

See my query on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Proposals#WikiProject proposal.

Simply south 16:28, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Nationalist bot

User:Zora is accusing my bot to be a nationalist bot. Please find her post at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Nationalistic_bot. All the bot did was to auto-tag "Stub" class and add Indian cinema project tag (a project she started) to Indian actor pages. I have tried to explain many times in the past on why talk page tagging helps with WP:1 and also helps assess the quality of articles. But she does not seem to understand it a bit. I would really appreciate if someone from this project, please comment at WP:ANI and help explain this to her. Thanks, Ganeshk (talk) 00:58, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Commented there. Kirill Lokshin 01:11, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:47, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject namespace

Has it ever been considered to create a new namespace for WikiProjects? Or "reuse" the Project: namespace (which is synonymous with the Wikipedia: namespace) and drop the WikiProject prefix? I believe shorter titles are better (for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science would become Project:Computer science.) —Ruud 13:37, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

This has been brought up and rejected a number of times. Aside from the point that the developers are not going to create new namespaces on a whim, there are two major problems with this idea:

• The theoretical: there's no particular division between WikiProjects and all the other stuff that's in the Wikipedia namespace; so splitting the two would be rather counterintuitive, and would merely create an artificial separation (which could be harmful to the acceptance of WikiProjects as integral components of Wikipedia, in the long run).
• The practical: actually changing namespaces would entail massive disruption—thousands of page moves, hundreds of broken templates, etc.—which could only be justified by some significant benefits. A slightly shorter page name isn't really a convincing reason here.

Kirill Lokshin 17:27, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

A counterargument to the theoretical problem would be that the Wikipedia namespace would then contain passive content like policies and guidelines, while the Project namespace would contain pages that help people to participate on Wikipedia. A counterargument to the practical problem would be that this is only a one-time cost which can slowly repay itself over a longer period. But if this has been reject several time already starting another discussion on this subject would not be helpful, I guess. —Ruud 20:02, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

It's more complicated than that, of course; many projects contain guidelines, while many other project-space pages (e.g. WP:PR, WP:RFC, etc.) don't. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 20:20, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Comments subpages for WikiProject banners

Can anyone tell me what's the point in those comment subpages that can be found on many WikiProject banners (like this and this)? These templates say that people should comment on the article ratings and its quality, which is good, of course. But they are directed to a /comments-subpage of the talk page, which doesn't make any sense to me. Why should we create a new subpage to say what someone thinks of the article, instead of using the article's talk page? This just seems to create a second talk page for an article, it seems. --Conti|✉ 18:39, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

So the comments can be easily transcluded into the project work lists. For an example, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Rail transport articles by quality/1. These work lists are generated automatically by a bot. Slambo (Speak) 18:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, I see. Maybe it just should be made clearer that these subpages are not for discussing the quality of the articles themselves. At least I got the impression that the subpages were supposed to be used that way until now. --Conti|✉ 19:15, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Monthly Projects Newsletter

I do like the idea of maybe issuing only one overall project newsletter per month or two, maybe something a bit more detailed and changing than many of the current newsletters, given their size and scope, may often be. It would also probably involve less man-hours in the development of just one such newsletter. Would anyone be willing to maybe help create and produce such a newsletter? I guess I see it basically introducing the new projects, maybe with descriptions of them, and maybe some centralized discussion of how to deal with new proposed or contemplated projects or workgroups. That last part might be particularly appealing, as it could help prevent creation of new projects which only get abandoned or deleted for lack of support shortly later. Badbilltucker 19:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Where would it be released or how it would be published? feydey 03:31, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

At this point, both questions would be unanswerable, as it's still just a basic proposal. However, I think that it might be fairly easily possible to have a link to it on the Wikipedia:Community portal, and certainly the existing newsletter distribution system could be continued for the larger, more inclusive newsletter. Also, I think we could probably have it linked on the WikiProject Council sidebar above. Badbilltucker 16:08, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Containment of numerous WikiProject banners

Some articles are beginning to fall under the scope of many different WikiProjects. This is creating a very long list of templates above the TOC on the articles talk page (see talk for an example). Would it be possible to develop some sort of javascript dropdown that can contain all the WikiProject banners? I've seen previous discussion regarding combining all the templates into one meta-template at the top but I know that is impractical. I believe a javascript drop down similiar to one that is included on many WikiProject banners is sufficient.--NMajdan•talk 14:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It'd be somewhat unpleasant to try and code, since many banners already include dropdowns of their own. In any case, is the problem something that the small-form templates can't handle? Kirill Lokshin 14:21, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm.... that is a good solution (although I'd still prefer a dropdown). Nevertheless, I guess I'll go take a look at the code of the banners and templates that I encounter a lot.--NMajdan•talk 15:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I think that project template code tends to already be too esoteric before adding support for the small parameter. There are other strategies I would recommend for talk pages flooded with banners:

1. Use the {{skiptotoctalk}} template at the very top. This skips past the banners to the table of contents.
2. Place all the banners inside a scrollable div with a height restriction. I haven't seen this done yet, but it should work.
3. This might be controversial, but I think we should consider having a special page for certain types of article banners, such as for projects and honors.

Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I'd like to see a couple of things:

1. Honors and whatnot being consolidated (an FA article that has appeared on the front page currently gets two banners for that, plus a possible peer review banner, etc.). Same with "this article passed an XfD on whenever", that for contested articles/templates/whatever, can get a bit crazy.
2. Related project banners getting rolled into the most specific banner. For example, a Mortal Kombat character already gets an MK project banner, but it also garners a CVG banner as well. Since the MK banner is the most specific, that project's banner should be the more visible, with a section that states what parent projects the page also belongs to. Another example would be Firefly; aside from the show-specific project, it also falls under the much grander TV project.

Given that the specific project usually has a lot more to do with the actual maintenance of the article than any parent project, I think we should organize them that way, rather than the other way around, which I've seen proposed before. EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

(This is getting a bit off the topic of banners, per se, and more into a general discussion of WikiProjects; but it's an interesting question nevertheless.)

There is, generally speaking, a certain range of scopes for which WikiProjects tend to "work"; scopes that are either too broad or too narrow tend to be problematic. (Thus, for example, a lot of the top-level projects, like History and Culture, are fairly useless, as are a lot of the very narrow sub-sub-sub-projects that people tend to create.) There's not too much that can be done to help the very broad projects, I think—the lack of any real sense of editorial community on such a scale means that a lot of things aren't really viable—but the very small projects are often better off being absorbed by a "large enough to function" project in the form of task forces (or a similar grouping). This eliminates the need for them to actually maintain any of the more labor-intensive processes that WikiProjects take part in, which means that the small pool of labor is no longer a problem in practical terms.

(The examples you give are interesting, however, in that I've come to the conclusion that this may apply less to projects dealing with popular culture topics. Unlike more traditional academic disciplines, where the expected editorial grouping is "people interested in subject X", the smaller pop-culture projects are based more on groupings of the form "people who are fans of X". The practical effect of this is that attempts to coalesce projects over fandom lines don't work as expected; while, for example, editors working on French military history and editors working on British military history will easily find common ground as editors of military history, editors working on, say, Star Trek and editors working on Firefly won't, because their interest is a function of being fans of a particular show, rather than a specialization from the broader topic of TV series.)

Beyond that, the question of "most specific" WikiProjects is tied fairly closely to the question of pre-approval of WikiProject creation. There is little, at the moment, that would prevent me from creating "WikiProject Firefly episode 3"; but the Firefly project would probably not be happy to learn that I had just replaced their banners with my new project's, thus removing the applicable articles from their assessment system, and so forth. (And this is not merely a theoretical point, either. We have, right now, at least one pair of independent but totally redundant WikiProjects; there has been a tense status quo maintained because neither is really stepping on each other's toes too much, but a restriction preventing them from double-tagging articles would obviously force the issue.)

And this becomes more important, obviously, as further functionality gets rolled into project banners. For example, some WikiProject banners have parameters that give access to the project's peer reviews, collaborations, etc.; if this banner gets replaced by a new ("more specific") project's one, these options will be lost. Kirill Lokshin 17:05, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the idea of consolidating related templates. I also have seen many articles associated with two or more projects that don't have parent-child relationships, such as Muhammad Ali being covered by WikiProject Boxing and WikiProject Louisville. This is just a wild idea, but perhaps we should create some sort of new enclosing construct (not unlike the <gallery> tag), maybe naming it <projectregistry>, within which would be situated all the various projects making a claim for the article, and beside each project entry would be an "info" link, that when clicked, would expand the entry to show the basic info for the project that we now see in project banners. Just thinking off the top of my head here. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:08, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

That's not really practical (at least not in that form), because many WikiProject banners contain significant functionality beyond serving simply as a link to the project. ({{WPMILHIST}}, for example, replaces 40+ standalone templates.) Kirill Lokshin 17:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, technically, the same stuff (including code) that is included in a banner template could be placed in a standard WikiProject transcludable subpage, perhaps /reginfo, and it would exist on the article talk page but be hidden until the info link is clicked. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 17:29, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I suspect there are technical issues there, though. It's only recently that we've gotten the ability to use links inside gallery tags, for example; I can only imagine what trying to parse something like that when the contents spit out arbitrary template code would be like. Kirill Lokshin 17:39, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that too. I didn't say it would be easy to implement. :) Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 20:02, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Again, the best way to handle this is by storing the metadata directly on MediaWiki's database backend. That is not as impossible as it may sound: it just requires a well-thought proposal, and considerable lobbying on mediawiki-l. Titoxd^(?!?) 00:59, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I know this is not impossible, but I don't know how this would be reflected in the article's talk page, and how projects would use it. Perhaps we should start a new thread on this, or point us to where this was discussed before. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 15:30, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, I consider a lot of the "extras" in the banners (such as the peer review stuff) to be pretty unimportant to the article itself; something like the quality rating of the article (and its importance within the project) is relevant, and should be kept. But... well, for example, let's say that I'm kicking around the Mortal Kombat 3 article. I switch over to the talk page, and see the MK project banner, but there's also the CVG banner. The Collaboration of the Week, CVG Peer Review, actually everything in the To Do list has nothing to do at all with article or its talk page; it is completely superfluous. Even if it was a Mortal Kombat related To Do list, it would only be marginally relevant; if there was a bullet point saying "work towards getting Scorpion up to FA status", that would be superfluous as well (Scorpion doesn't appear in MK3... dammit).

Avoiding too specific a project is a valid concern, but I think that can be sorted out via (at best) common sense or (at worst) an MfD. I do think your comment about popular culture being a different beast than, say, various veins of military history is spot on; I hadn't actually thought about it that much before, but there is a distinct difference between the two. EVula // talk // ☯ // 01:28, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

It looks like I wasn't very clear here; when I mentioned peer reviews, I didn't mean project to-do lists containing some arbitrary peer reviews, but rather links to project peer reviews of that specific article. For example, note the MILHIST review links on Talk:Battle of Edson's Ridge; these aren't general things, but metadata dealing with the particular article in question, so the talk page of the article seems like a reasonable place to put them. Kirill Lokshin 01:36, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Criteria need to change

For example

• Rate = GA
• Importance = list

I think the whole criteria should change. Lists and some templates and categories could be highly important to the understanding of a particular subject yet they are not given a rating properly other than "list", "template" or "category", as though of minor importance.

I suggest it should be different

For example

• Rate = GA
• Type = List article
• Importance = high

I am not relating to any specific article or so on. Simply south 13:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually, lists are (were?) meant to be rated using normal article criteria; there isn't a "List" assessment level in the conventional scale. Kirill Lokshin 14:04, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I've just seen it under many projects, but not every one. How about templates and categories?

Found one for list e.g. {{TrainsWikiProject}} ::for List of companies operating trains in the United Kingdom

Simply south 16:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

An excellent point for discussion, thank you for raising it. In principle I agree, though in practice there is a problem; rating a list can be really difficult, both for quality and for importance. How would you rate List of South American countries, which we are including in Wikipedia:Version 0.5? It looks nice, it is complete, does that make it viable as a Featured article? Should it have a map, or does that belong on another page? How important is it? The topic is really important, so one person may rank it as "Top", but another reviewer may say it simply duplicates content found in List of countries and nominate it for deletion. So if you can lay out some clear guidelines on how to rate lists, I think we would love to include them. If there aren't clear guidelines, it is really challenging to rate articles in a meaningful way. Any suggestions? Walkerma 16:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure. Does anyone else have ideas? Simply south 17:59, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Since you've displayed the TWP banner, I might as well pop in here too. {{TrainsWikiProject}} understands class=list now (which is used on a very limited number of articles now), but it will display similar to class=NA (shown above) and suppress the importance rating display. I've been generally taking an approach similar to the FA criteria when rating articles for quality and usually don't put a rating above Start unless the prose is more than half of the entire article. I don't foresee anyone proposing a Good lists process yet, but we do have Featured lists. It doesn't matter much to me if we want to include an importance rating for lists; such an update will actually simplify the TWP banner code a little (I don't know about the other banners, but it's one less class parameter value that needs special treatment for TWP). Slambo (Speak) 19:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Assistance from people who know banners and task forces requested

The Religion project has just created a Left Hand Path task force. I'm trying to adjust the {{WPReligion}} banner to accomodate, and getting no luck. The basic founder of the group has requested this image be added to the tab for the work group. Any and all assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Badbilltucker 01:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Possibly fixed? I'm not entirely sure what the intended functionality was here. Kirill Lokshin 01:58, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Definitely fixed. Thank you, O great one! Frankly, I just tried to copy another banner (Germany) and screwed things up in the process. This should work wonderfully. Thanks again! Badbilltucker 02:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Best projects?

Is anything happening with the exemplar projects? I'd like more successful WikiProjects to nick ideas from examine for inspiration. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 22:13, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Assyrian people

I was wondering if I could get the approval from the council to move the project to WikiProject Assyria, as me and User:Nareklm have decided to include everything about Assyria in the project, and not just people. Chaldean 20:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I was recently involved in a dispute over this, and I will just say two words without antagonizing anyone. The problem is that Assyria is not a recognized state or entity. In the same way the stubs for such unrecognized states/entities have been deleted (the Tfd for Abkhazia-stub just closed couple of days ago, and TRNC-stub is always speedily deleted), there is a fundamental problem with such unrecognized and undefined entities. However, it is very legitimate to have a WikiProject for Assyrian people, and I just think that the name should stay at WikiProject Assyrian people. Cheers! Baristarim 20:37, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

On a side note, I am also interested in this project and have joined it. Baristarim 20:38, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

The point of the move is that the project's aim is not just involved in Modern Assyrian pages, but all Assyrian pages, from Adiabene and so forth. Their is very little info on the Assyrian empire on wiki, and every Assyrian king page is a stub, with the exception of a couple. The project will have two "groups" where one will work on ancient Assyrian related articles, and another group working on modern Assyrian issues. Chaldean 20:50, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

As there is no conflicting project with a similar name, I can't see any reason why the project shouldn't feel free to be bold and move the page. I might also add it to the former countries section of the geographical page of the project directory, to emphasize the point that this project intends to deal with the old states identified by the name Assyria. I personally can see no real objections to such a move, anyway. Badbilltucker 21:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Project entry conditions

I and another user have expressed concern about the apparent entry condition for WikiProject Rational Skepticism. Other projects are open to everyone. WikiProject Christianity, for example, is not a project for Christians, but a project to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Christianity. WikiProject Paranormal is not a project for believers in the paranormal, but a project to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the paranormal. WikiProject Rational Skepticism, in contrast, casts itself as "the central hub for Skeptical Wikipedians to get together and work on improving Wikipedia" and seeks to "serve as a nexus and discussion area for skeptically-inclined contributors". The members emphasized in response to our concerns that their goal is to improve Wikipedia, but are project entry conditions an appropriate way to do so? Tim Smith 02:50, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

In one sense, no. Clearly, we don't want anyone violating the WP:OWN guideline. However, it is certainly possible that the members of the project might think that people of their opinion are outnumbered in wikipedia, and don't want fervent believers of any stripe joining in to "undermine" the project's work. Personally, I think it would be best if the project page were just changed to use more neutral phrasing. As I am somewhat peripherally involved in the project already (I'm one of the three most recently joined members), and also an active member of just about every religion project out there, I think that in this case it might just have been someone using "overenthusiastic" and POV phrasing, not necessarily implying rampant POV behind the project though. Badbilltucker 18:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Special interest groups

comments please --Larry laptop 00:40, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Guide?

Is there anyone currently writing the guide, or attempts to organise it? Shall I just start writing some parts? Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 13:30, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Please feel free to have a go at the (many!) sections still to be written! :-)

(There are, incidentally, HTML comments in most of the unfinished sections that give some indication of what was intended to be covered; I have no idea if you'll find them useful, though.) Kirill Lokshin 13:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)