Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed

← Back to Op-ed

Discuss this story

See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed/Earlier for discussion that occured prior to publication.

• Honestly Task Forces have been dying for many years. See how many Tasks Forces are inactive at the WikiProject. GamerPro64 03:31, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

• To my opinion, task Forces are temporary by nature. When the main job is done, there is not much left to do. Keeping them artificially alive might be a waste of time. I fact, I have far more worries about WikiProjects that set the tone for the entire project, for example by setting their own notability guidelines without consent of the wider community. And often in breach of the standard notability guidelines. The Banner talk 07:49, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

• Personally, I think whether or not a task force dies depends both on how long the task Force's topic is relevant for and how much old pages need to be updated and new ones created. For example, for pages about books by a certain author, you rarely need to go back and add or change anything once the page has been written and tweaked a bit. On the other hand, the Nintendo task force likely has a lot of stuff going on right now and will for a while because Nintendo-related pages are being updated and new video games are constantly being released (both by Nintendo and third-party developers, including some larger video game companies) for the Nintendo Switch. We've even seen a few new faces editing those pages. — Gestrid (talk) 15:42, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
• IMO task forces die because they tend to be very niche and the brainchild of only one or two editors, and are sometimes created as a result of a tantrum if they're not getting their way in a wider WikiProject. As a result, when they drift away from Wikipedia or the topic, the taskforce dies with them. WikiProjects are a much more stable way of improving material so I'm not too worried about the death of task forces. Number 57 20:45, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
• I get confused by editorials purportedly written by two people, but with frequent use of "I" and "me." Do these editors share a brain? Isn't that against policy?03:09, 16 July 2017 (UTC)~TPW

• I tried to clarify this by adding the author to the top of each section in pre-publication copyedit. Suggestions for how to do it better are welcome... ☆ Bri (talk) 03:14, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

• Just task force and subgroups are dying? Many WikiProjects are also semi-dead ever since we keep losing editors. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 05:28, 16 July 2017 (UTC)
  • Editors come and go, task forces have active and inactive phases - and an inactive taskgroup is a steady accumulation of tasks resources and queries for the next person who wants to revive that task group or wikiproject. In an editing community that is broadly stable we should expect this. OK yes I know that there is a steady increase in the number of very active editors, those who save over a hundred edits a month in mainspace, but overall edits are pretty stable at 5 million a month and have been for a while (up from barely 4 million at the 2014 low point) - so we need to get used to the idea that the overall community is broadly stable even if within that there are many other trends, positive and negative. ϢereSpielChequers 11:27, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

• The Banner makes the interesting argument that a task force is temporary by nature...Indeed, the name would suggest that they were created to complete some sort of "task" and nothing more. This is perhaps easier for tasks where the scope is, even if large, is finite. Operation Majestic Titan and Operation Bora both cover all things battleships and all things Yugoslavia in World War II, respectively. That's expansive, to be sure, but, even if this encyclopedia is never finished, they will probably hit a wall on relevant content. This is in comparison to the African military history task force (of which I am a member) which has, not only a much broader area to cover, but a scope that is expanding every day. So in that case, it really is a never-ending task. It could very well be its own WikiProject, as could many other Military history task forces. Of course, OhanaUnited points out that there are plenty ailing WikiProjects to go around. So, we can conclude that narrow scope isn't the only thing that kills working groups. It would be nice to see an op-ed on the problems WikiProjects face and how to fix those (if one already hasn't been written). That quote taken from the Military history project contributor seems geared towards that end. I would argue that that project is the most successful on Wikipedia, and seems to be the only one to have found out what to do with the A-classification. Ideally, some of these task forces/WikiProjects will become more active as Wikipedia expands. For example, I'm currently a member of WikiProject Democratic Republic of the Congo which, not too long ago, was tagged as "semi-active". I've undertaken some of the recommended steps for reviving the project, but there's only so much I can do with only a handful of interested editors. I sincerely doubt that there are any Congolese users on en.wikipedia. I wish that weren't so, but in a country with such sparse internet access and with a population that speaks mostly French, Lingala, and Swahili, I'm not surprised that any haven't turned up. Now, question the legitimacy of a task force devoted to an author or a project centered around religion in a single country all you want, but you would think that a country with over 80,000,000 people (also the 11th largest by land in the world, the location of Belgium's sole colonial adventure, the site of the "African World War", and the birthplace of the most stereotypical dictator of all time) would have its place among the other WikiProjects. I pray that this project (and its WikiProject Africa brethren) will in time garner more African users as internet begins to proliferate the continent. -Indy beetle (talk) 20:40, 17 July 2017 (UTC)

• In some ways, I find that Wikipedia's extreme permanence can make completed/dead taskforces confusing for new users because nothing really marks that they are finished. WP:Molecular and Cell Biology had a WikiProject_Cell_Signaling taskforce that finished up before 2008, but it was only in 2014 that any notice was added to the the page directing people back to the parent project. The deserted discussion page can be pretty confusing for new users just getting the hand of Wikipedia's workings. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:13, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

• Some task forces are active periodically, they might appear dead for long periods but spring into life for specific reasons. An example I'm familiar with, WikiProject South Africa, has task forces for Municipalities and Politics. They may have very little or no activity for years at a time but when a census or election comes around the pages spring into life with a frenzy of activity for a couple of months or even just a few weeks before going back to sleep again. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:11, 31 July 2017 (UTC)