Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/September 2014

*O mark question

Hey guys! I'm kind of confused about the *O mark. Do you only add that if the article is tagged in March or April 2013 or anytime before 2014?  SmileBlueJay97  talk  02:23, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I left a typo in the drive page. I have corrected it. Sorry about that.

Put a *O if the article was tagged in June, July, or August 2013, the oldest three months in our backlog. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:12, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for clarifying and happy copyediting!  SmileBlueJay97  talk  06:29, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Review This Edit

Hi, I was wondering if someone could take a look at my copyedit of Universe of Metro 2033. I'm relatively new at copy-editing and I just want to make sure I'm on the right track.

Many thanks, Johnston.josh (talk) 03:42, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Johnston.josh, and welcome to the GOCE. Thanks for your edits here; you've made a good start of fixing some very unencyclopedic prose. There are a few areas of concern though; you need to de-capitalise 'The' in the first paragraph's second sentence. In the 'Translations' section you've got, "Prior to 2014, no books in the series were released in a country where English 2014[ref here], no books from the series were released in a country where English is the prominent language.", so you should tidy that sentence up and remove the repetition. Most of the other changes I'd have made are stylistic ones.

Otherwise it's a good first attempt at copy-editing. My advice here is to work slowly and steadily through the article; copy-editing isn't a race. If you need to check any stylistic points the Simplified Manual of Style is very useful; for more detailed information you can find lots of links in the templates below. You might also find Tony1's copy-editing tutorial pages helpful.

I hope you find the above review useful. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 19:53, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Can someone double check on my first major copyedit?

Article: Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, Collective diff of my entire copy-edit: link. Thanks. --AmritasyaPutra✍ 09:07, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

AmritasyaPutra, you definitely improved the article. Nice work. I made some additional edits that you could take a look at to see what was left. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:02, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Jonesey95, thank you! --AmritasyaPutra✍ 01:35, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Second copy-edit

The second article I took up was entirely copyvio and pov and had zero references. I had to purge most of the content! I have marked ce done, cumulative diff. Now that I read a lot to check copyvio I will add few references to it and cleanup further. Thank you. --AmritasyaPutra^T 03:43, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Before. After. I will go over it once again with a fresh mind to self-review the huge changes I did. --AmritasyaPutra^T 04:51, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Updating here: got a few suggestion from Philg88 here and made relevant change. --AmritasyaPutra^T 07:22, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

A good attempt at removing POV text. Unfortunately your changes were reverted and your couter-reversions almost led to an edit war. You can always abandon a c/e if things deteriorate like that; just remove the c/e tag and let the others get on with it—there's no point getting yourself blocked. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 04:02, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I had politely asked them to make their changes and I removed the ce tag. After a few days time and no response on talk page I put back the ce tag and completed the copy-edit and then only removed it. The unfortunate edit war happened after that. I withdrew from the article and they have added more referenced content to the article, which expands the article (although I would have liked to copy-edit again and fit it properly in the article), — all this was after the copy-edit was marked completed. Point taken, going forward I will not get into copy-edit at all if there is any kind of disagreement. Thank you! --AmritasyaPutra^T 06:00, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Third copy-edit

I have removed GOCEinuse and marking it complete. Cumulative diff of 80 edits over past 16 days: link. Few intermediate edits towards the cleanup/copy-edit by two other editors too. Since it was a huge article and only my third copy-edit I would appreciate a feedback. Related message on article talk page: link and relevant Wikiproject talk page: link. Thank you. --AmritasyaPutra^T 03:02, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

It looks like you've done a good job of removing unreferenced text, and condensing and clarifying the remaining text. You could have removed unnecessay wikilinks, for example on "scientist", "explorer" and "England"; unless they're used out-of-context or have an obscure, alternative meaning peculiar to the subject matter, most readers won't need them explained. Nice work overall. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 03:53, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

 Done, Diff. Thanks for the feedback Baffle gab1978! --AmritasyaPutra^T 06:08, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Fourth copy-edit

Mentioned on article talk page also: link. Cumulative diff: Link. Feedback is welcome! Thank you. --AmritasyaPutra^T 17:47, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Change since beginning

I know we're off to a slow start, but surely the +95 change in the total number of tagged articles on the first day is not correct? It would be nice to have the real starting point so that the overall change is not so dispiritingly large. Tdslk (talk) 21:29, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

All of us coordinators missed updating the category's article count at the start of the drive (it's the end of summer where I live, and I have been away frequently). It was surely higher than 2,316 articles, the number I put there when I created the drive page on 21 August. We typically get 400+ articles per month, so our starting count was probably in the 2,400–2,450 range.

The real backlog progress target is the total backlog count at the end of our last drive on 31 July, which was 2,199 articles. And, of course, clearing out those old months. Keep on chipping away! – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:31, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Think I updated the backlog at the start of the drive, but the AfC crew may be tagging more than the usual number of new articles; I gulped when I saw that jump too :-). All the best, Miniapolis 01:05, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

The numbers don't add up, though. Right now, there are 140 newly tagged articles from this month, while we've reduced the number of "old" tags from 337 to 283, a decrease of 54. So the most the tagged article count should have gone up by is 140-54=86. (Of course, this doesn't account for the many copy edits to articles tagged between September 2013 and August 2014, so the true number should be much lower.) Would it be crazy to suggest that we use the total from September 2 (2411) as a more accurate baseline? Tdslk (talk) 18:57, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Tdslk and I are saying the same thing. If the starting count were about 2,400, the numbers would add up. I'm going to use my vast powers as GOCE lead coordinator to adjust the starting count to 2,411, call that an estimate, and move on. My fellow coordinators are welcome to overrule me if I am arrogating too much power to myself. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:34, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Jonesey! It's silly, I guess, but that number was (obviously) bugging me. Tdslk (talk) 20:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Word count

I'm not sure what this means. Is there some way of keeping track of how many we add/remove? Crowqueen (talk) 10:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi Crowqueen, The word count is the number of words in the article before you edited it. There are more details in the FAQ. Cheers, Tdslk (talk) 14:14, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Tdslk. Crowqueen (talk) 17:15, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

When signatures become disruptive

I've changed several custom signatures for this drive page's subsecs—where they've been misleading (don't include account name/name is misleading/impersonating etc), don't include a link to the account's talk page, or have been distracting (large text, random colours, etc). Do others find these custom sigs disruptive/irritating or is it just me? Should I leave them alone? Where do I (we?) draw the line? Baffle gab1978 (talk) 00:20, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I've never been personally bothered by them, although I could certainly imagine an instance where they went too far. My feeling would be that if a non-standard signature is allowed everywhere else in Wikipedia, we would have to have a really compelling reason to ban it here. Tdslk (talk) 17:45, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks; it's probably just me! I guess i need to be more tolerant of these things. :-) Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 01:51, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

It's you and me, Baffle :-). I didn't even like my own (fairly-quiet) signature in the TOCs, and noticed that Torchiest uses {{User0}} (a simple way to link to user and talk pages). All the best, Miniapolis 01:09, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Kemerovo Institute of Food Science and Technology

The Kemerovo Institute of Food Science and Technology does not need copyediting, in my opinion. Please check it out and remove the copyediting tag if I am correct.--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:06, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Checked and removed tag; it's an underdeveloped article and a c/e would be ineffectual and this stage of development. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 16:52, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

User:Gelacost Mouse

Gelacost Mouse, who joined Wikipedia on September 5 and has copyedited one article as part of the current drive, turns out to be a sockpuppet of recently indefinitely blocked user PapaJeckloy, who had also signed up for this drive before he was blocked. (See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/PapaJeckloy for the sock confirmation, which occurred about 15 minutes ago.) As I write this, Gelacost Mouse has not yet been blocked, but it's only a matter of time.

Among the many issues with PapaJeckloy's nominated articles at DYK were those of prose: in one nomination, after it ran into trouble because the article's prose was poor, he claimed on over half a dozen occasions that he had completed major copyedits of it, but the prose remained poor. I strongly recommend that someone competent redoes whatever he has copyedited as part of this drive. Thanks for your attention. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:51, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks BlueMoonset; it's appreciated. The editor did a fair amount of work on Jimmy Alapag (diff). User:Gelacost Mouse actually added the c/e tag to that article, so it doesn't count towards the drive anyway—see this diff. I'll remove his/her subsection, since the master account is indeffed, then revert his/her work on the article. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 04:18, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

 Done; Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 04:59, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Interesting—and, alas, not atypical—that PapaJeckloy would do it improperly and added the c/e tag rather than edit an already-tagged article. He had to know that it would be discovered by the checkers. Sorry the chaos spread to GOCE; he'd already caused a great deal of trouble at DYK and GAN, and many of his reviews and edits had to be unwound both before and after his eventual block. Thanks for taking care of this. BlueMoonset (talk) 05:47, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

That's OK, I usually check out new copy editors at least once per drive. It's lucky you uncovered the socking before it caused any chaos here, so thanks for that! :-) I'll keep an eye open for any new socks of this person. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 22:28, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

List of ninja video games

I see no need for copyediting for this List of ninja video games. If you agree, please delete the tag.--DThomsen8 (talk) 16:16, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

 Done I deleted the tag as it is mainly a list, and that the copyedit request did not specify that anything particularly needed copyediting within that list. -AngusWOOF (talk) 16:25, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I see no need for copyediting for 2006 Trincomalee massacre of NGO workers, either.--DThomsen8 (talk) 16:38, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

It did need some c/e work and some formatting fixes; some of the text—"Investigation" particularly— was rather jumbled and I'm surprised you didn't spot that. I've done the c/e and have removed the tag. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 18:30, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Copyedit of a page tagged by yourself

Does copyeditting a page you have tagged by yourself count? I am a new page and a random page patroller so I add maintenance and deletion tags to articles I patrol. I have been avoiding copyeditting pages that I have tagged for improvement. I recently tagged and copyeditted the articles Rampur Kalan and Kwari River but I am not sure if they count. If they don't count, please feel free to remove them from my list.  SmileBlueJay97  talk  12:25, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

No, those do not count in the drive, but we appreciate your effort. Please update your list yourself.--DThomsen8 (talk) 16:51, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Although we are all supposed to assume good faith, copy-editing and taking credit for articles you have tagged yourself creates an ethically dubious impression even if your intentions are pure. It seems like something that should be avoided. You are always welcome to copy-edit articles you have tagged yourself – we are all here to build an encyclopedia, after all, and we are all volunteers – but credit for that editing should come in the form of satisfaction in a job well done and in a contribution to the greater good, just as it would if you copy-edited articles when there was no monthly drive in progress. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:54, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Cauvery Bridge

I tagged Cauvery Bridge for copyediting myself, and then did a number of changes and fixes, but it still needs work, including which bridge is the title bridge. Is it the stone bridge, the railway bridge, or the new high level bridge in the inline citation?--DThomsen8 (talk) 13:33, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I tightened it up for you. It's a stub, but it's now a clear, concise stub. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:24, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Last call

The September copy editing drive has ended. Please make any final edits to your article lists and the leaderboard (it is not updated automatically) in the next 12 hours or so. It is OK to edit your section of the page, and the leaderboard, even though the page is archived and says not to edit it.

Barnstars will be distributed in the next few days. Thanks to everyone who participated. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:14, 1 October 2014 (UTC)