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How to edit/update the listing of quality of articles on a wikiproject page

I've been an active Wikipedian for several months now, but I'm well rounded as I liked to be. One of my ongoing issues is the update of the quality list grading scale for selected WikiProject articles. They usually update by itself, but hasn't done that at all, and it's been almost a few weeks.

This was the page that I was referring to that being a problem with? Is there anyway that you can help me here? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading! LeftAire (talk) 18:43, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

The problem might be explained by Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Toolserver replication lag (permanent link here).
—Wavelength (talk) 18:55, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Is it only me, or is List-class mostly counterproductive?

Whenever an article is rated as being list-class, that basically removes it from the usual process of assessment-driven quality improvements. And I hardly think the Featured List class remedies this dysfunctionality to any significant degree. The problem is furthermore exasperated by many articles being assessed as list-class when they really aren't primarily lists but merely contain one or more lists in addition to prose sections.

I would suggest that we get rid of the List and Featured List classes from the WP 1.0 assessment scheme altogether. Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists should be sufficient as a focus arena to work on lists improvement in particular. __meco (talk) 11:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Whether to use that assessment class is up to individual WikiProjects. I believe that MILHIST rejected it for the reasons you give here. But this is the wrong place to make such a proposal anyway, because the WikiProject COuncil does not control the WP:1.0 assessments. Try Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 11:56, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
Ah.. I wasn't sure if I were in the right place and forgot to ask! I'll post it there.
Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Is it only me, or is List-class mostly counterproductive?
__meco (talk) 13:15, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Help needed to change name of Wiki Project

Recently our category name was changed from Transcendental Meditation movement to Transcendental Meditation. Now we would like to make the same change in the name of our project at WP:TMMOVEMENT. Can anyone tell me how to do this? -- — Keithbob • Talk • 14:07, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Its just a simple move like any other page. -DJSasso (talk) 15:01, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
Duh! I was too mesmerized to think of the simple and easy solution. Thanks DJ! -- — Keithbob • Talk • 18:41, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Ranking WikiProjects by quality assessment

Could we have the implementation of a comprehensive list of WikiProjects that ranks the activity / quality of projects by the different classes on the quality scale, possibly adding weighted measures by taking into account the total number of articles adopted by the projects? __meco (talk) 16:50, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Why? What's the benefit? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:33, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Not sure if this helps, but last summer I asked for a list all projects ranked by size using the assessment system. These were the results. I couldn't convince anyone to make this into a regularly updated database report. -Mabeenot (talk) 22:28, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Something on a par with the link provided by Mabeenot, except by the measures I suggest, and with a nice layout (a bit of color) would be very nice, and also of course updated every week, or every fortnight or month. The reason would be to motivate WikiProjects to compete against each other. That would be yet another implement to encourage increased project activity overall. __meco (talk) 23:27, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
NICE!! I've actually wondered about this for years... I always thought that it'd be a nice addition to the toolserver. Best, Markvs88 (talk) 17:06, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
I don't know how motivating that would be, but perhaps it would work for some people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

New WikiProject Mozilla Proposal

Hello WikiProject Council, I would like a reassessment of WikiProject Mozilla. It was previously turned down, but I think it could benefit from its on WikiProject. There are dozens of Firefox articles and Mozilla articles that are impossible to coordinate on my own. What many people are unaware of is the giant scope of the Mozilla. It has lots of software, and tons of history. As an example, we would cover articles lesser known to general users. As an example, typing Mozilla into Wikipedia search gives back 3,686 results, and typing Firefox produces 8,353 results! Clearly most of the articles only contain one instance of the word Mozilla or Firefox, but there are enough articles that a WikiProject is needed. We also cover projects that only have semi-relevance to Mozilla, such as the Netscape browser (Firefox is based off of Netscape, and then later Netscape became based on Firefox). Anything semi-relevant to Mozilla would be covered. I believe that this Wikiproject could find hundreds of articles to cover - all in need of some sort of repair. Thank you! ҭᴙᴇᴡӌӌ 20:00, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad that you're enthusiastic about the subject.
A WikiProject is a group of people who want to work together. It is not a subject. Do you have a group of people? If not, then there is no WikiProject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:07, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Absolutely, that is the aim of the WikiProject. I am in contact with many people interested in contributing to Mozilla. How can we move forward to have the WikiProject start? Thanks! ҭᴙᴇᴡӌӌ 23:49, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Will someone please tell me how I can move forward to start the project? Thanks. ҭᴙᴇᴡӌӌ 16:32, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Strange WikiProject proposal

I have come across a strange Wikiproject proposal: Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/The 39 Clues. I cannot tell what this one is supposed to be about. It almost seems to be that the guy wants 2 separate wiki projects: one completely on him/herself and one on a book series that does not have very many articles about it. I want to say something yet there is no "Discussion" area. Could someone please help me with this. Personally I would take down the proposition, yet I don't have the authority to. Bloope (talk) 18:00, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Facebook use

Hi,

Are any Wikiprojects using Facebook to co-ordinate communication/communicate to others to get them interested to join the project? Are people free to start doing this? --Just my 2 cents -- Hemanshu (talk) 22:04, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

You may be interested in reviving Wikipedia:WikiProject Awareness.
—Wavelength (talk) 23:15, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Wiki project! Wikipedia Experinces!

I am interested to create a Wikiproject "Share your Wikipedia experiences" if there is not one already. The idea came to my mind after this discussion. Surely many editors have many good/sad/delighting experiences in Wikipedia! --Tito Dutta ✉ 17:42, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Not entirely sure if any content gathered by such a project would be particularly encyclopedic, nor am I at all sure where one would expect to place any information the group were to gather. I can't think that there would be many, if any, relevant pages in article space that would clearly relate to this topic, for instance. John Carter (talk) 18:18, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
It would probably violate WP:NOTSOCIALNETWORK anyway. Roger (talk) 19:20, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
It does not violate WP:NOTSOCIALNETWORK, Wikipedians are allowed to share Wikipedia related experiences!--Tito Dutta ✉ 21:26, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Katy Perry

Just thought I'd let you guys know and deal with this. This WikiProject was created without discussion and only contains 44 articles in it. — Statυs (talk) 03:25, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

The more important question is, how many editors does it have in it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:59, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
Why are we implying that our editors cant have use of pages for organizing and for there collaboration efforts in improving Wikipedia? - no harm - no malice intent - no need to save space on our servers - let them work and not spend time defending there positive efforts. Moxy (talk) 00:06, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
The WikiProject Council is not an "authority" that rules on what WikiProjects may exist and which must die. There is nothing in the rules that prevent a group of editors starting a Project without "permission". So good luck to the members of WikiProject Katy Perry, I wish them well!
I am one of the founders of WP:WikiProject Disability, myself and a two other editors started it entirely on our own after two previous "submissions" to this Council were given the cold shoulder - a few years later the project is still going and growing. Roger (talk) 09:41, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
Moxy, you can have as many pages as you want. But a WikiProject is the editors, by definition. If you don't have a group of editors, then you do not have a WikiProject. You just have some pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:36, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Template:Controversial-Class

Template:Controversial-Class has been nominated for deletion. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 06:07, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Category:D-Class articles

Category:D-Class articles has been nominated for deletion. However, Template:D-Class hasn't been nominated. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 04:34, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

This is properly an issue for the WP:1.0 team, since article assessments are their ball of wax. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:37, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

How to deal with contestations of project scope

I would like to draw attention to an interesting discussion on principles at Talk:Evolution, where a group of editors have seemigly taken offense at that article's having been added to the purview of WP:RELIGION. It raises the question of whether wikiprojects are allowed to decide their scope on their own or whether local concensus at a given page can remove or add specific pages from the projects domain of interest? Input is requested. I personally don't give a damn either way but I think the principle is interesting to clarify and I do find it quaint and slightly provicative that some editors feel so strongly about the page having any ties to the concept of religion or the related wikiproject. We've had similar issues with WP:CONSERVATISM and WP:USA in the past. Perhaps we should make a procedure for determining project scope in contested cases?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:56, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Evolution by itself has nothing to do with religion, the evolution controversy has everything to do with religion. The first should not be added, the second has been already to WP:RELIGION. -- Kim van der Linde at venus 13:34, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Ownership of articles#Multiple-editor ownership.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:27, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia already has an official guideline that addresses this. See the WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN section. I have just bolded the relevant text, because we get a lot of questions about this.
One thing that might help make sense of this: a WikiProject is a group of people who want to work together. It is not articles or pages or anything else. A WikiProject is—is, as in "exactly equals"—humans. The name of the group need not have any relationship whatsoever to the pages that those people choose to work on. So you and your wikifriends could form a group that you name "WikiProject Apples" and then choose to work solely on oranges. Or on whatever articles you encounter through Special:Random. It's okay. As long as your group actually has an interest in supporting a given article, you should feel free to tag it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:48, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Question on WPUS

I think that the templates in use don't really deal with a case like WPUS. To tag all of the US related articles would bring the project to several million articles. Not really a manageable number. Not to mention the number of pages to be flagged. It would seem a lot better to make this more like a super project that by default allows contents to be listed from other projects so that the sub projects do not appear to be children of the huge project. As long as one project in the US does not wish to be included as a child of WPUS, either a second banner would need to be added or these articles would not be included in the scope of WPUS. It would seem to be more efficient to just say WPABC should be included in WPUS and just not add or modify templates. Don't know how this would actually work, but can we say that a Wikiproject that has a scope of over 50% of the articles in the encyclopedia works (I think the US may be 50%, anyone know)? I'm not knocking the project, just questioning if there is a better way to deal with a project that large. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:55, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Which pages and how many to track is 100% up to the editors at that project. If they find their own scope to be overwhelming, then that's their problem.
BTW, WikiProject Biographies has three times as many as WPUSA (which only has 300K articles), and I've never heard anyone complain about them tagging so many pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:41, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Reminder template for authors to add assessment templates

I've created a template to remind article authors to add assessment templates to the talk pages of their articles. See User:Piotrus/AT. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 18:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

sweet! Maybe flag to replace "keyword" with a relevant project? Agathoclea (talk) 20:09, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

replacement for WPCouncil

FYI, there's an RFC proposal for what seems like a replacement for the WikiProject Council, see Wikipedia talk:The need for coordination.

70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:30, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Redux of a replacement for WPCouncil

The proposal above is dead, an updated version of the proposal can be found [[ User:Wer900/Community Council of Wikipedia|here]] and there is an ongoing Village Pump discussion here. I am the originator of both the original and the new proposals. Wer900 • talk • coordinationconsensus defined 04:05, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Language of Absolutes

Write a static blog with the above title. Would excerpts from this be a suitable subject for a Wiki Project.

Hamish84 (talk) 07:36, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

PS. Too old now to digest all the protocol.

A WikiProject is a group of people who want to work together to improve the contents of this encyclopedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:29, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

A long time time ago I broached the idea of updating the links template and it appeared to reach a consensus to proceed. Hence I've modified the template to add a little more color and to include links into some of the other general sub-categories. I hope this design meets with your approval. Thanks. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:16, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject?

Is there a WikiProject where users can bring articles to verify if sources are being used correctly and users are not keeping true to WP:INTEGRITY? Any help would be appreciated. -B2project (talk) 00:48, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check.
—Wavelength (talk) 00:58, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

New WikiProject

There's a new WikiProject: WikiProject Animals in media. Brambleberry of RiverClan Chat ♠ Watch 21:09, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

This seems interesting. I'll be sure to check it out. User:Jay Starz —Preceding undated comment added 17:12, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

WikiProjects Directory should have a section for Wikipedia Help Projects

There are a growing number of projects for help using wikipedia as well as those that are a part of the Dispute Resolution that I strongly feel are a part of the Wikipedia Help sections to guide editors and keep them from leaving for many reasons. I feel Wikipedia needs to begin listing Wikipedia help more prominently and I would like to begin here on the WikiProjects Directory.--Amadscientist (talk) 06:27, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Please feel free to add the projects in question. :-) Kirill [talk] 15:33, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
OK, thanks. I will start that as a sand box.--Amadscientist (talk) 19:11, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Is it just me or does the Project directory seem to have a clich in it right now?--Amadscientist (talk) 19:15, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
By the expression "clich", do you mean "glitch"? If so, what glitch does it seem to have right now?
Wavelength (talk) 01:10, 13 July 2012 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Wikipedia.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:47, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Got it. I don't know what I was seeing before. I think there needs to be some adjusting to that however and I would like to move the page to Wikipedia Help on the directory page itself (thank god I don't have to do this. Doing a big happy dance...but it does need updating as well) and shorten and clarify the directory listing if that would be alright.--Amadscientist (talk) 19:55, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Assessment across WikiProjects

Hi, I'm pretty new here, and I have waded through quite a few pages trying to find the answer to this question. Q: If an article is tagged by multiple WikiProjects and is assessed as A Class by one, what is the process for the other WikiProjects to assess it? Do they just go along with the assessment, or do they all need to conduct their own processes to assess it? Help needed... Thanks, Peacemaker67 (talk) 10:02, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

A class requires a specific review which is only undertaken by a few wikiprojects. The article would likely be a 'B' class unless it had passed a GA review in which case it'd be GA class. FA class trumps all. Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:31, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, that helps. Peacemaker67 (talk) 10:36, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Some projects might copy an A-assesment of another if they have no own process, but that is best left to those projects themselves. Agathoclea (talk) 12:24, 20 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks Agathoclea, I naively thought there might be one system. (Boy do I live in lala land...) Little did I consider the organised chaos that is Wikipedia. (sarcasm unintended, I love WP really...). Obviously there are different WikiProjects, but fortunately there are fairly objective generalized assessment standards for GA, and that sets a good basement level. I have an article I helped get to A Class with MILHIST that is also in various Balkans WikiProjects at GA and I am bracing myself for the POV backlash... I may be pleasantly surprised...? Right! Peacemaker67 (talk) 12:34, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Government, Politics and Law: A Rather Problemsome Marriage

I am requesting background information and discussion of a potential new WikiProject revolving around government, as a separate and disctinct topic from politics and law. To my dismay, the topics have merged, with government being subsumed under politics, and suffering because of it. And not to make the discussion too easy, the broad meaning (no, not exact meaning, but even a common understanding of the term) of "government" has 2 major understandings in English: the English meaning (see what I did there?) referring to the cabinet, or executive; and a broader meaning which includes other governmental topics such as judicial and legislative functions, geographical administrative units, sub-governments, and law. (Law is also a topic that has their own WikiProject, but is also a focus of Politics.)

These 2 problems have cause me in particular major headaches for articles that I have created or made substantial edits to, such as the federal government of Iraq, government of Kosovo, and the judiciary of Germany. These articles are good example of the difference between politics and government: government articles are way less controversial (I kinda wish more people would vandalize these pages so at I know people care; j/k please don't!), way less visible and edited, a major basis for understanding politics, and fundamental to understanding how law effects politics (instead of the major focus of WP:WikiProject Politics which is usually the reverse).

I cannot raise this topic at WikiProject Politics no more than I can start a conversation about C-SPAN at a Tea Party rally. It is just too crowded, with too much going on. (I will, of course, try and draw interested parties though.) WP:WikiProject Law is another related topic, but those participants probably consider both the broader issues and finer points of law as having little to do with things like the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the rest of the massive $100,000,000,000+/year California government (isn't that like 1/3 of the entire economic output of Greece?). People who write about such disgusting, revolting institutions (j/k DMV you're alright) and watch C-SPAN, IMHO, tend to stand apart from those who write about libertarianism and watch Fox News.

My main concern at this point is has this point been raised before, and what the consensus was. I do not want to just toss out a proposal. Int21h (talk) 03:27, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit: Also, maybe a better place to raise the discussion. Int21h (talk) 03:33, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Law has been notified. Int21h (talk) 03:50, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
Note: WikiProject Politics has been notified. Int21h (talk) 03:50, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
While your arguments make sense, the purpose of projects is to bring people together. Do you feel there are others who also would like to focus on various governmental structures without focusing too much on either politics or just law?? CarolMooreDC 04:01, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
Yes. Many of the editors of governmental topics do not tend to focus on either politics or law. Since we have no place to congragate or attach to any one WikiProject, we seem to be forced to cross list all of our discussions, with the result that none of us can find each others posts, and no one ever replies. :( Excellent example: see this at WikiProject Talk Politics. Someone posted questions about some Swedish Parliament committees, and, like me, has been forced to resort to an RfC, as I have always done by experience, because where else is it going to go? Its not a political question. Its not a legal question. Its a governmental question (albeit in this case related to naming, which is what my RfC's are always about too.) They will, of course, receive almost no feedback from anyone who cares, and it will disappear from the RfC talk before they can crosslist it to enough WikiProject talk pages for someone like me to see it. Not because we don't care, but because I am not following the RfCs or WP Politics or WP Sweden for government topics because they are rare compared to their other traffic. Int21h (talk) 04:14, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
And do not dismiss their RfC either. It is a rather perfect example of governmental discussions. Dry, mundane, technical, and in particular nothing to do with either law or politics. Int21h (talk) 04:22, 21 July 2012 (UTC) Or Sweden, really. Int21h (talk) 04:35, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
And it also illuminates another point: the confusion over which WikiProject to raise the issue on. I chose WikiProject Law for my naming issue, and since it was international couldn't really raise it at the national WikiProject. But in general, we are forced to congregate at WikiProject California, WikiProject Germany, WikiProject Sweden, etc., all of which usually care nothing about the government topic in question. People, IMHO, hate talking about government more than they hate talking about politics. (Bring up ObamaCare at dinner and you may get angry replies, but bring up CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) and you will get angry replies about ObamaCare, akward silence and people excusing themselves from the table.) These are very broad WikiProjects and the volume of dicussion will put discussions into archives before I browse them, and no I don't want my watchlist to be nothing but Californian, Swedish, and Politics, nor does anyone else. Int21h (talk) 04:49, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
Give it til mid week and if no objections arise, I'd say gather your statists and anarchists (to be NPOV - ha ha) and git going!! :-) CarolMooreDC 20:15, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

You can call on me to offer guidance on subjects related to chemistry, including as it applies to the life sciences. My current career focus is on chemical synthesis and medicinal chemistry as it applies to small molecule drug discovery, including structure-based drug discovery (involving macromolecular crystallography, small molecule enzymatic and biophysical screening, etc.). Training is through UChicago PhD, with major pharma experience. Currently a res prof at a major university. Prof D Meduban (talk) 16:53, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I've responded on your talk page with some WikiProjects that might interest you. -Mabeenot (talk) 17:25, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Converting a task force to a WikiProject?

Where do I go to if I want to convert a task force to a WikiProject? Also, how would I would get the banner, portal, and recognized content run by bots updated once it becomes a WikiProject? Erick (talk) 08:35, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/WikiProject.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:48, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
How many people are active in that task force? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
13 including myself. Also, the main concern with the way it is now is that there are articles fall under the task force, but not the WikiProject. Specificially, the Latin American music task force includes artists that are performers of Latin music but are not from Latin America. For the proposed conversion, it would be renamed "WikiProject Latin music" and it would fall under the music genre category rather than regional music. Erick (talk) 17:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
Thirteen people should be enough to sustain the group. You might look at WP:MEDTF, which outlines the steps for going from WP to TF. I believe that you'll need to do the opposite of each of those steps. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Lists of JSTOR reviews of reference sources

OK, if anyone wants it, I have gotten together the list of the various reference sources of a basically encyclopedic nature which have been reviewed in journals on JSTOR. I did not include some very focused sources, like for instance field guides to birds of California, because there were frankly way too many of them - these are almost all reference works of some sort of topical overview variety. The material is currently unsorted, in multiple e-mails to myself. If anyone wants them, they are, of course, free to drop me an e-mail and I will forward the e-mails to the editor. They could then go over them and add them to pages of individual WikiProjects, which I think might be very helpful to those projects. It could, if the books were reviewed, ultimately give them lists of articles we do and don't yet have, and reference sources which discuss them. I will be trying to get together the list for the various religion and philosophy projects, and then breaking it down into units for each project, but would definitely welcome anyone doing similar for other WikiProjects and groups. But be warned there are several thousand reviews to go through, so it might take some time, even for some of the smaller scope projects. John Carter (talk) 00:40, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

This is worthy of mention at User talk:Emijrp/All human knowledge.
—Wavelength (talk) 00:54, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Notice of deletion discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia_in_Schools

-Hugetim (talk) 15:04, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Puntland

Wikipedia:WikiProject Puntland says it is a pilot project not yet started. (The proposal to create has 3 supporters) Is there a flag for {{WikiProject status}} to tag that? -- 76.65.128.252 (talk) 06:18, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Not that I know of. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:34, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

I've noticed that a couple of WikiProjects have recently been talking about issuing newsletters to their members again, and that there are still a few who actively do so at present. I tend to think that maybe they might be among the better ways of getting interested individuals to maybe think about developing topics and articles that they might not think of otherwise.

As more or less the sole editor involved currently with the Christianity newsletter, I was thinking that, maybe, having an additional newsletter which might cover the broader fields of Religion/Philosophy/Mythology might also be useful, particularly in maybe drawing attention and input on subjects which are perhaps not getting a lot of attention. I think the Buddhism WikiProject, for all intents and purposes, seems rather dormant right now, for instance, and maybe getting together a broad newsletter on religion/philosophy/mythology which might include that in its coverage, and perhaps other religious and philosophical topics, might get a bit more attention and maybe interest in some of the perhaps important but also maybe neglected articles and topics involved. Maybe, and this is just a maybe, it might not be a bad idea to have other broad, topical-type newsletters for some of the other areas of wikipedia. Maybe, for instance, something along the lines of a newsletter for, basically, each of the "hundreds" of the Dewey decimal system, or each of the categories of WP:1.0. If there were interest in such, maybe, and this is just a maybe, we might be able to somehow integrate in some of the material which might be considered for the newsletters in the Signpost as well. Such specific topical updates might also function as a valuable supplement to the Community Portal as well.

Anyone interested in maybe helping develop some such newsletters? John Carter (talk) 16:43, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

If you do start up some cross-project newsletters, let us know at the Signpost's WikiProject desk so we can include links in our weekly roundup of WikiProject news. -Mabeenot (talk) 21:06, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Proposal for possible Signpost column on "topical" areas

I personally get a feeling that some of the "major" content gets neglected in a way, including a lot of the 1.0 material. Getting a bit more attention to the efforts here, and maybe in some of the WikiProjects which deal with content regarding the major topics, might help, maybe. I have made a proposal for maybe getting some possible regular coverage in the Signpost regarding what might be thought of as the major topical areas at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom#Proposals. One of the editors there responded that some sort of proposal might work, and seemed to agree that maybe it could fly if people would prepare the material. Would anyone here to maybe has helped work on some of the major topical areas be willing to maybe help with a few trial pieces for the Signpost, to see if it might be useful and worth the effort in the long run? John Carter (talk) 16:23, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

I read the linked discussion, but I don't think I understood it. The obvious goal is to have major/VITAL articles be less embarrassing, but I'm not sure how writing an essay is supposed to fix that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:39, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
Maybe not so much about "preparing an essay," but maybe getting a few editors from various closely related WikiProjects to work collaboratively on some sort of "interview" for the Signpost. So, as an example, maybe getting together some editors from various projects dealing with "Science," for example. If nothing else, fostering a bit more cooperation between closely related WikiProjects by maybe getting a few of them to work together and find what "common ground" might not be getting a lot of attention from either might be useful. John Carter (talk) 21:58, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Help please!

Good evening Wikipedians,

I was wondering if someone on this council page would be able to assist in a debate at Talk:ABU Song Festivals 2012, in which an ediotr is constantly trying to force Project Eurovision from removing the article from their project despite the article genre being within scope of the project. I and a couple of other editors have tried numerous times to explain that no person can decide whether or not an article should be tagged to a specific project, and that the decision on project tagging would be up to a team of members from an interested project (if the article could be within scope), or an active member from a project (if the article is within scope). regardless of how many times the user had been told, they still keep trying to force their way as if to try and proclaim ownership. Any assistance would be appreciated, just in case there are things that haven't already been explained to the user. Much regards, Wesley Mouse 19:48, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

The official guideline is at WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN. If the non-member persists in removing someone else's WikiProject banner after being encouraged to read the guideline, then please leave a note at WP:ANI to request that the person be blocked for disruptive edit warring over the banner. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:22, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for the assistance here. I had provided the same link to which you have highlighted above, once before to the user. And he was still insistent that Project Eurovision had to remove the banner, and that the project should hold an RfC in which a !vote would be cast to decided if an article is to be added to a project. I have never heard of a project !voting to add articles to their project that are clearly within the genre and/or scope of a particular project. The same user has also been invited to join the project, but they refuse. It does seem quite an unusual behaviour, and one I haven't come across before. Wesley Mouse 11:46, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
I am this user, but I can not agree with the description provided by Wesley Mouse. The question is that user Wesley Mouse, solely, has decided that article ABU Song Festivals 2012 falls under the scope of Eurovision project he is part of. Despite the understanding that this music festival has nothing to do either with Eurovision and EBU being of very different format, and there has been no general agreement within project Eurovision to accept this festival under it's banner, he tries to implement project's RfC on a very different event, which is not mentioned in the RfC at all. I have pointed him out, and invited him to open a discussion in the Project's Talk page (which I would gladly join to add my arguments) to determine whether Eurovision RfC can be applied in full to a very different event, or may be a bit different approach is required. In general, surely, I can not object this article being accepted to the Project:Eurovision, but so far, there have been no single example of non-EBU related events taken under this project, thus current project's RfC can not be automatically reflected on a very different in structure events. The only thing I'm asking now, is to open a thread in the Project, which will explain why this event is being added to the project, and where it can be discussed if it can be governed by current RfC or with some (may be minor) alterations. So far, no other user of the Project:Eurovision, except Wesley Mouse has voiced his opinion on the subject. Ruslanovich (talk) 21:39, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Ruslanovich, firstly I and 2 other users have informed you about this several times now. Just because the project is named ProjectEurovision, doesn't mean they handle with only Eurovision-related articles. The project also works on articles of a similar genre. How many times do you need to be told this before it sinks in? You are seriously starting to get disruptive with this nonsense. I sincerely request that you cease this immediately. Wesley Mouse 21:43, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Secondly, there are other articles non-EBU related that are under the project banner - do you really want me to list all 50,000+ of them for you? Thirdly, I have already told you that the RfC you speak of is dated before the ABU Song Festival was even created, so naturally ABU wouldn't have been mentioned during that RfC, which even closed before the ABU article was created. More senior members of the project discussed on each other's talk pages that article layout discussed in the RfC would be spread across all articles of a similar genre. It would be impractical to hold a !vote debate on the project's talk page to determine if we place an Project Eurovision banner on it or not. That decision is made by any member of the project. Now please let it drop, I have asked you many a time to let it drop, and this behaviour of yours is becoming disruptive. Wesley Mouse 21:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Oh, and please stop accusing me of "solely" placing an article under a banner. If you really must know, CT Cooper (talk · contribs) instructed me to place it under the project banner. Wesley Mouse 21:53, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Tagging, again

There is an RFC at Talk:Tom Cruise#LGBT Project on whether the LGBT studies group is permitted to tag and track the article (the article says that Cruise has famously sued people for wrongly claiming that he is gay), or if we need special rules to discriminate against them, because a hypothetical reader glancing over the talk page might interpret the presence of their banner or their project categories as indicating that Cruise is gay.

There is also a related discussion at WT:BLP.

I know we had that RFC on this exact point a while ago, and that it turned up massively in favor of the WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN guideline, but it seems that we need to go through it all again. So anyone with an opinion about whether or not a group of editors should be permitted to track any article that they're interested in, even if it means that someone might get the idea that suing people for claiming that you're gay is the kind of thing that interests people who study gay rights and queer culture, should consider expressing their opinion, whether that opinion is yay or nay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:32, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

No-importance?

Please see Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#No-importance?, and consider joining the discussion, on the relevance of "No" as an importance criteria. Thanks! Fortdj33 (talk) 18:03, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Autoremove of inactive project members

At the recent London Meetup, one topic of conversation was that projects frequently seem to be dormant and contain editors who don't appear to have contributed in years. Wikipedia:WikiProject Pink Floyd has a policy that if you don't edit a related article on the project for six months, you get taken off the list. I like this as a policy, as did several others at the meetup, as it's obvious then who active project members are and who's worth contacting, before you waste time trying to talk to someone who last edited in 2007. Do any other projects have this policy, and if not, why not? --Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:37, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

That's one way to do it, but it's somewhat confrontational in that you're assuming a person doesn't care about the project. I could choose not to edit video gaming articles yet desire to be part of the project because I happen to enjoy reading the discussion that takes place on the talk page. That doesn't necessarily mean I would even edit the talk page. --Izno (talk) 16:24, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
Every couple of years, WPMED goes through its list and moves people who haven't edited at all (any page, regardless of subject) to the inactive list. I think that we usually leave a note on the user talk page inviting the person to become active again if they want (because what we really want is for them to be active, not to have the shortest possible list).
I think that most groups don't bother with membership list maintenance because it's tedious and time-consuming. I'd like to have a bot or script for doing it, but so far everyone seems to do it all by hand. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
Ever project should decide what is considered an active user. Ever so often I use this tool to .. fix renames - hide indef blocked users and remove inactive users (i set it for a year) etc on the projects I am active with - i.e of outcome seen HERE.Moxy (talk) 22:36, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject naming

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Côte d'Ivoire where WP:OWN has been brought up as a reason why wikiprojects cannot name themselves? -- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 23:57, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

WikiProjects can name themselves whatever they want. WP:WikiProject Philippines doesn't even use the word "WikiProject" in theirs. (Click through to see their real name.)
A WikiProject is a group of people, not a subject area. If you tell a group of people that they're not allowed to choose their own group's name, they might get fed up and quit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:25, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

MFD

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject ArbCom Reform Party may interest some people here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

A discussion is occurring that is of interest to the Council

Please see the discussion here, at WikiProject Conservatism. Feel free to comment. RGloucester (talk) 20:42, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

New banner needs further work

I created {{WikiProject Images and Media}}. I get lost in setting up all of the features for article assessment and quality. Can I get one of the experts from WikiProject Council to do it? Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 08:55, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Did you not get the help you needed at Template talk:WPBannerMeta? That's where I'd ask, and it looks like you tried that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

MfD notification

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:GLAM/GibraltarpediA Fram (talk) 09:02, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

What's the difference between a sister WikiProject and a related WikiProject? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 11:26, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

People tend to use them interchangeably, but I'd suggest that "related WikiProjects" is a broader term than "sister WikiProjects." In my mind, "sister projects" would be like grouping WikiProject Pittsburgh and WikiProject Philadelphia, while "related projects" would also include their parent projects (WikiProject Cities and WikiProject Pennsylvania in this case), any subprojects or task forces (WikiProject Pittsburgh Steelers comes to mind), and other geographically or culturally related projects (WikiProject Appalachia). One confusing bit about the term "sister projects" is that it has also been used to compare different wikis or language Wikipedias (i.e. Wikisource, Wikinews, English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, etc.) which is evidenced by the Signpost's defunct sister projects column. -Mabeenot (talk) 18:38, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

FAQs about WikiProjects in the Signpost?

Looking back at the question that was asked in the previous thread, I think it would be interesting to have a special issue of the WikiProject Report dedicated to frequently asked questions about WikiProjects. The questions could be about proposing projects, creating templates, maintaining portals, interesting statistics about WikiProjects, how to overcome certain hurdles, or even lighthearted oddball questions that people have asked over the years. I'd be willing to try answering the questions or we could enlist volunteers from the WikiProject Council and other projects to provide answers. We could collect questions from editors here at the WikiProject Council or in one of the Signpost's sandboxes. What do you folks think? –Mabeenot (talk) 05:18, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a /FAQ at the top of the page. Most questions are not lighthearted, I'm sad to say. A couple of common categories are:
  • "I built it, so why didn't they come?" (Because a WikiProject is the people, not the pages. If you didn't form a group of people, then you didn't actually build a WikiProject. This is not a magic storeroom where we stashed all the editors with nothing to do.)
  • "My WikiProject doesn't want his WikiProject to tag that page. Make them stop!" (See WP:OWN.)
  • "I set up a WikiProject. Whaddya mean, I'm not able to dictate the standards for all the articles under my self-selected scope?" (See WP:OWN again, and WP:Nobody reads the directions, too.)
And then there are technical questions about bots and banners, and questions that should have been directed to the WP:1.0 assessment team. Perhaps someone else can add more to my list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

ranking WikiProjects by liveliness

I posted the question below to Village pump (technical) and no one's answering. At Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Science I find quite a large number of WikiProjects listed, with a "yes" or "no" answer for each on the question of whether it is "active" or not. How that information was compiled I don't know. Can anyone here suggest anything?

How would I get a list of discussion pages of WikiProjects (so I'm talking about pages called "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Whatever") ranked by the frequency with which they are edited---in effect the most active WikiProjects listed first?

Michael Hardy (talk) 17:44, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

There's got to be a way to get this kind of information. I'd suggest trying the folks at Wikipedia talk:Database reports. I'm not sure if this is helpful, but there is already a list of the most-watched WikiProject talk pages. –Mabeenot (talk) 01:55, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
All of the information in the directory is compiled manually and should be assumed to be out of date until proven otherwise. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:53, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Proposal for de facto DYK / Good Article WikiProject merger

A proposal is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Proposal for a de facto merger between WP:DYK and WP:GAN, with the former's Main Page space being used to showcase the latter. It is being strongly opposed by many DYK regulars, and questions have been raised at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#Alternate GA proposal about whether it is compatible with the WikiProject Council guide. Some input from WikiProject Council contributors would be helpful. Prioryman (talk) 01:12, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

You seem to have confused the community-wide institutions of GA and DYK with WikiProjects related to them. There is no WikiProject merger proposed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:55, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a Wikipedia: WikiProject England

Why are projects such as Wikipedia:WikiProject_England and other wikiprojects concerned with specific places not listed here? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 15:07, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

There are similar wikiprojects that look at the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 15:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Where is here? Vegaswikian (talk) 22:09, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
It is listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Geographical/Europe (version of 00:25, 8 July 2012).
—Wavelength (talk) 23:20, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Template:Maths rating

Template:Maths rating has been put to WP:TFD over whether a WikiProject can control their own banner coding or not. -- 65.92.181.190 (talk) 14:18, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The discussion closed as no consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:10, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

WPWater

I've proposed that WP:WikiProject Water supply and sanitation by country and WP:WikiProject Water supply and sanitation be merged. See WT:WikiProject Water supply and sanitation by country. -- 65.92.181.190 (talk) 08:25, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Cleaning up

Going through articles tagged for clean-up, for example Orphaned articles, I notice that a large number have no wikiproject tag or even a talk page. It occurs to me that adding a WikiPoject template would bring these articles to the attention of people who could clean them up. Are there any tools to list articles in a category that do not belong to a WikiProject? Has a message box been considered for talk pages, like {{Infobox requested}}, that marks and categories articles that have no Wikiproject tagging? --Traveler100 (talk) 05:01, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

This is not a direct answer to your question, but it may be helpful. An editor recently stated that, of a total number of 4,082,654 articles, it appears that 3,919,430 articles are tagged by at least one WikiProject, leaving 163,224 (4%) without a WikiProject. The wider context is at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-22/WikiProject report.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:36, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Interesting statistic comparison 4% if all articles are not in a project but 30% of recently clean-up tagged articles have no talk page. (Not totally scientific but here is an example User:Traveler100/tasks).
Does that 30% include redirects, and categories? I know that I tag all articles, sometimes categories and rarely redirects. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:25, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Just articles in categories, for example 20% (603 of 3051) of articles in Category:Articles with too few wikilinks from October 2012 do not have talk pages. --Traveler100 (talk) 21:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
If you've got a category that you believe should all be tagged by a given WikiProject (e.g., everything in Category:Cancer probably should be tagged by WPMED), then you can have a bot do the tagging. I don't think anyone's needed to do that for a while, though, and you definitely want a human to read through the cat for improper entries before requesting one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:14, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
I am not looking for an automatic way to tag with WikiProject, just to identify which ones are not tagged. Firstly they tend to be articles not in categories, except clean-up categories, second agree it should be manual. Actually the best way would be to have a tool that lists pages that do not belong to a Project. I have written a proposal but failed to find a way of requesting such a tool apart from individuals talk pages of people who look like they can do such things. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:29, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
The WP:1.0 people depend on WikiProject assessments, so they might have ideas. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:41, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

New WikiProject for squatting

I've started WikiProject Squatting to address our coverage of squatting-related topics. — Hex (❝?!❞) 10:37, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

This seems like a very narrow topic, but if you can find other interested editors, all the power to you. –Mabeenot (talk) 16:14, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Intelligence

There's a WP:WikiProject Intelligence that was created by repurposing a redirect, but only appears to ever had two members, and no activity on the talk page except people saying that it replicated WP:WikiProject Espionage. Seems like this should be nominated for deletion? -- 70.24.250.26 (talk) 13:03, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Intelligence task force.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:46, 13 November 2012 (UTC)
I'd restore the redirect rather than deleting, but I think you should ask those two members before doing anything. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:43, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
That's all that's been discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Intelligence, ever since the project was created, and nothing else. -- 70.24.250.26 (talk) 09:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)
It appears you're right. I'll redirect it. –Mabeenot (talk) 02:42, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Effectiveness of WikiProjects

Has anyone tried to measure the effectiveness of WikiProjects? By this, I mean whether a given WikiProject actually made a significant difference to the quality of articles compared to not having a WikiProject. For example, I recently found out about WikiProject Banksia, which seems almost freakishly effective - 21 featured articles out of 348 total! But is that the WikiProject, or is it a handful of dedicated individuals who would have worked on those articles anyway? RockMagnetist (talk) 15:01, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

All that WikiProjects do is give a centralized location to talk about working together to fix articles in their scope. So if the editors in that project used the WikiProject to co-ordinate then I would say yes the WikiProject was effective because its easier to co-ordinate on one single page than a bunch of individual talk pages. WikiProjects aren't so much about the editors as they are about the co-ordination and making it easier to do so. -DJSasso (talk) 15:21, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
Some of the ratings applied to certain categories are just so irrelevant to those editing the article. Should we even be aiming for an A? (I'm not, "your" standards are too high!)Zoele (talk) 10:39, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Top Ten pages within a category

Hi Guys,i saw some of your work on categorization and wandered if you could help me

i have created a media wiki and used categorization to organize it. the front page is broken into four rows looking like this


First Heading

First heading category containing pages relevant to that heading using the categorization syntax catagory



also at the bottom is the link to the popular pages, however these are all the pages on the wiki using <TopTenPages offset=1/> the offset is the main page

what i would like to do is have each of these four rows containing the popular pages within that category. I have looked everywhere but cant find any syntax that will allow me to use popular pages within another if that makes sense? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.60.98.134 (talk) 11:07, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Try the WP:Help desk. They might know the answer, and even if they don't, they'll probably know where to ask for the answer. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:16, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

WikiProjects Marketing and Advertising

I've just discovered Wikipedia:WikiProject Marketing, which looks to my inexperienced eye like a still-born attempt by a single user to create a WikiProject. There also exists the inactive Wikipedia:WikiProject Advertising that would seem to be covering the same sort of ground.

I don't know what is the correct thing to do here (if anything)? Thryduulf (talk) 15:54, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

There are not enough editors interested in marketing & advertising topics to justify two. Maybe we can delete Wikiproject Marketing and adjust Wikiproject Advertising to "Wikiproject Marketing and Advertising." Corporate 16:02, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
Personally if the name is changed it should changed to "Wikiproject Marketing" because it is a bit more specific and incorporates everything that the term "advertising" does. Peter.C • talk • contribs 11:21, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
If something is more specific, then it incorporates less.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Hmmmm... my background is in marketing and I would normally consider advertising a separate topic, but a quick Google search reveals that Advertising is actually frequently considered a component of marketing. So renaming to marketing may actually be appropriate because it's most broad, rather than most specific. Corporate 19:20, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
They could be merged, if no one at either group objects. The instructions for merging are here. I'd merge it under "Marketing" or as "Marketing and advertising", because marketing sometimes claims to include advertising, but never the other way around. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:20, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Incidentally, Category:Media manipulation includes Category:Advertising and Category:Marketing as parallel subcategories.
—Wavelength (talk) 21:47, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Marketing and advertising are somewhat parallel categories in these web directories.
—Wavelength (talk) 22:05, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
  • To me, marketing refers to the marketplace and advertising more broadly refers to delivering concepts. I recently made Category:Health campaigns as an attempt to organize the large number of health educational outreach projects featured on Wikipedia, and now I wonder if that is advertising or marketing. It seems like such articles would be a part of this kind of group, as would other non-profit or activist awareness campaigns. I do think there should be a merge, but the merge should be inclusive of media efforts to promote concepts and metaphorically "sell" ideas. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:14, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
—Wavelength (talk) 23:50, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
—Wavelength (talk) 23:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Request for help: Puerto Rico government finances

Gentlemen,

I need help in establishing a collaborative and independent sub-project regarding the finances of the government of Puerto Rico (see Puerto Rico government budget balance and public debt of Puerto Rico). Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on these matters and I need help digging into the references available in English and expanding these two articles onto a Wikipedia:Good article.

I believe this should be a project spearheaded by the WikiProject Business/Accountancy Taskforce with help from:

What needs to be done?

Background. In a recent referendum the people of Puerto Rico opted to change their current political status. This is exposing Puerto Rico in international news. One subject of interest are its finances, in specific the public debt of Puerto Rico and its ongoing Puerto Rico government budget balance that has experienced a deficit in 12 consecutive years. I beleive that it's in the best interests of Wikipedia, the Puerto Rican people, and the international community to have Wikipedia:Good articles on these two subjects.

—Ahnoneemoos (talk) 13:57, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

A WikiProject is a group of people. The way to start a WikiProject is to get your best wiki-friends and work together. If you don't know anyone who wants to work with you on this, then you shouldn't be creating a WikiProject. You should just go join whichever of those groups seems most interesting or most friendly to you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:17, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Thanks but I'm not interested in starting a WikiProject based on this. Per the WikiProject Council description this is a place that "acts as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration" hence why I posted this inquiry here. —Ahnoneemoos (talk) 21:00, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
It is actually in the interest of wikipedia to have every single article we have at GA status or better. And, honestly, there are a number of very important articles at a rather poor level of development. Unfortunately. The best thing I can think of is to maybe go to the Wikipedia:Community portal, and/or maybe the Wikipedia Signpost, and propose the changes there. I think in general both of those talk pages have a lot more people actively watching them than this one. You seem to be proposing in your first post of this thread that there be some sort of "task force" for these articles, and the best place to probably get responses regarding that matter, in any form, would almost certainly be at the talk page of one of those extant WikiProjects, with probably notices of one discussion added to the talk page of other relevant WikiProjects, probably including also Wikipedia:WikiProject United States. Unfortunately, I regret to say that, in general, the fact that we need good articles on any number of topics does not mean that we will necessarily get a lot of attention to them in the short term. I wish that were not the case, but I cannot count the number of times it has been true. John Carter (talk) 21:58, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

What's the best way to promote a WikiProject?

I'm trying to drum-up some interest in Wikipedia:WikiProject Skateboarding. The WikiProject has been inactive for quite some time and I am working on getting it active again. But it's pretty clear this is going to require a team effort...

I have left talk page messages for previously active member editors who are still active on WP but there's not many of them. I'm creative, but not nearly creative enough to create a Wikipedia ad.

Short of leaving a 600 x 600 ad at WP:ANI (sure, I'd get banned, but it might be worth it, long-term) or vandalising the Main Page, what are my options? Stalwart111 01:11, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Here's something to try: find out who has been working on the most important skateboarding articles recently, and leave personal notes on their talk pages to invite them to put the WikiProject's pages on their talk list.
There are more ideas at WP:REVIVE. Good luck, WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:21, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, REVIVE has been helpful. I'm finding that even the "main" articles haven't been edited much in months. Some in years. Thanks for the advice, though - much appreciated! Stalwart111 11:39, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Talk Page Deadlink Tagging

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnkitBot

Should this bot tag talk pages (on WikiProject-by-WikiProject basis or without) with a message that a deadlink has been found in that particular article. According to me (and only me), I think it should help because in most of the cases it's only the page creator who actually gives any attention to his/her own article (not always). Then, it's even usual for a passerby to see and fix it. I (i.e. my bot) could work on a project-by-project basis (on request) and tag the articles with the deadlink notification. But then as it always does, consensus is required. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 12:26, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Very few bots are actually working on it (there are many but very few active). And the pyWikipedia weblinkchecker.py script doesn't actually support the feature you are speaking of. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 05:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
I was under the impression that there was already a bot doing this sort of thing. --Sue Rangell ✍ ✉ 20:51, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
That's what I thought too until one fine day I came across this. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 05:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
  • This sounds like a good idea - however I opposes as there are so many articles with dead links (as of right now 114,578 articles) that it would overwhelm talk pages. That said a great idea would be to have a dead link watch-list like our Wikiproject Watchlists.Moxy (talk) 21:07, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Why, it's just a small message on every talk page. Track down the bot's edits, done. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 05:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Or the bot could edit only one page (a WikiProject subpage), which is less work/revisions/etc but to the same effect. In fact its better, that way editors can mark pages as done without having to load each new page to check if its done. A win-win. I would oppose a bot that spammed a bunch of un-watched talk pages and expected human editors to clean up after it. Legoktm (talk) 06:27, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
All right. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 06:46, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Have to agree with Legoktm here. There have been similar bots in the past and they just made a huge mess. Would agree that a single page or a page per wikiproject would be a good way to go. -DJSasso (talk) 19:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
I think these comments might be better placed at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnkitBot, where Ankit is saying things like "Consensus thread for Task 1 made at" and "Consensus for Task 1 is being built up at" this page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:34, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
It could have been done there but then the BAG member told me to do a separate discussion. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 12:54, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Tagging

One question, please. Can we tag talk pages in articles of Serbian Ortodox churches with {{WPSERBIA}} if those are not located in Republic of Serbia, but some other neighboring countries? Thanks! --WhiteWriterspeaks 11:33, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Considering that it has actually originated in Serbia or something, it should be (and it is now). Otherwise, just because an article's name is Foobar it shouldn't be tagged as a part of WikiProject Foo. --Ankit MaityTalkContribs 15:41, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
The official advice is at WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN, a subsection of the WP:WikiProject coordination in the Council's guide to WikiProjects. If the group of people at WP Serbia actually want to support an article, then they may tag it. That group of people is free to support and tag any article at all, even if it has nothing to do with Serbia. (Of course, a group of people that joined together because of a mutual interest in Serbia is unlikely to be interested in supporting things unrelated to Serbia, but they are permitted to do so if they want.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:17, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
You're missing the Balkans aspect of the story. The articles in question are locations and territories recently fought-over in the Yugoslav wars. More specifically, Serbian insurgents were fighting to break them away and merge them with Serbia (to put it simply). A couple Serbian users have now gotten together and began tagging such articles en masse as part of WP:WikiProject Serbia, whereas the stated scope of the project there explicitly makes it clear that it concerns "Serbia and Serbians", that is to say, not Serbs in general - but residents of Serbia ("Serbians", see wikilink). Literally dozens of such articles were tagged in rapid successions, with little or no improvements therein; surely there's a line to be crossed here? To me, this seems little more than baiting.
I'd also like to draw attention to the fact that WhiteWriter neglected to mention any of this, as well as neglected to inform any of the four opposing users of this thread. After being stalled, the user attempted to change the scope of WP Serbia on its talkpage. Seeing as how that's stalled, the user also started threads here and at WP:VPM.-- Director (talk) 00:42, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
To put it simply this recent wars occurred twenty years ago so that your racist attempt to connect all of us just because we are Serbs with this wars is disgusting (you know, I have 19 years). Also, that "Balkans" aspect has nothing to do with this what we are talking. None of us in this way advocating any radical ideology, we just think that editors from WP Serbia may be interested in these articles (such as Serbian Orthodox Secondary School, Association for Serbian language and literature in the Republic of Croatia, Serb National Council, Zagreb Orthodox Cathedral, Republika Srpska...). If we were doing political propaganda don't you think we will change articles content because readers really only watch that, and not talk pages at which WP are placed to help other editors? The only nationalist here are you since you're asking for disrespect of Wikipedia policy and that WP Croatia (my first project where I am active member for a long time) owns that articles just because they are on the territory of present-day Croatia.--MirkoS18 (talk) 02:08, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Scholarly approach

Greetings folks, I have been involved with several WikiProjects. In fact I set up the Philosophy task forces after seeing the value in it from the Military History project. I am wondering about a few issues.... Should we even have WikiProjects like Wikipedia:WikiProject Parapsychology, Wikipedia:WikiProject Creationism and Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicine? How about Wikipedia:WikiProject Anarchism, or Wikipedia:WikiProject Socialism? Don't get me wrong, the Anarchist task force has produced some stellar work, and I'm a big socialist myself. My point is that we shouldn't segregate based on like-mindedness. These should be task forces of larger projects (as Anarchism is) for the sake of bringing in academic experts. For instance, I think that WikiProjects should only be organized under the name of academic departments like universities. In this view, Anarchism, and Socialism would be task forces of WikiProject Politics, and there just wouldn't be a Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicine. I see that as totally harmful of Wikipedia's purpose. There should be a Pseudoscience task force of WikiProject Science instead. Could a proposal to abolish special, ideologically based WikiProjects and make them task forces of academically based projects work? There are all kinds of changes I would make if I could do it unilaterally, but what is the political environment here?Greg Bard (talk) 09:47, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I demur. The concept is to get folks for whatever logical or illogical reasons to look at and improve the huge number of pretty bad articles. I would not object to a wikiproject on "red things" or "large rocks" or the like as long as the project gets editors to improve what we have. Would it be nice to abolish all ideologically-driven editors? Maybe. Would removing wikiprojects which attract them do much? Nope. Should we try merging projects into "superprojects"? Nope. Any project to be efective must be sufficiently small in nature to allow editors to actually try improving articles - and a project with 50,000 articles will not work. Projects should be "human-sized" and since we are unpaid jumans, that seems about right. Cheers. Collect (talk) 12:54, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
I think Kirill commented somewhere that maybe the best way to go in general would be to have WikiProjects which have basically become more or less moribund be merged together. In general, there is a lot of enthusiasm and article creation in the early days of any given project, but, once the enthusiasm dies down and the comparatively harder work of developing articles starts, and having to determine where to put some content, and article titles, and other things become bigger factors, maybe it is in the best interests of groups to be merged together, with the at least possibility that the comparatively few really active editors developing the content might be able to work together. In general, though, if a project has not shown much activity of late, particularly those which have been tagged as "inactive," in some cases it can reasonably be said that maybe the best thing to do is find some broader topic of which it is a subtopic which is somewhat more active and propose a merger of some sort. In general, I personally think it would also help a lot if the possible parent project has some sort of clear material available to help in the development of content, like, for instance, maybe a list of reference works related to the broad topic which can be available as a starting point for development and maybe as a point for comparison regarding current academic opinion on a topic, weight which might be assigned any particular subtopic, and the like. John Carter (talk) 17:36, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
A WikiProject is a group of people, not a subject area. Birds of a feather flock together/And so do pigs and swine. We can't really prevent like-minded people from banding together.
Having said that, yes, if a WikiProject (the group of people) doesn't seem to exist any longer, then the pages can be merged into a group that does exist and is interested in the area. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:11, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
This could well be an extremly disruptive move, to start merging without a clear consensus to do so, regardless of the perception of low to no activity. I am also a little concerned by the original commentators question about "but what is the political environment here"? Seems to be asking for something that cannot be answerd and the list of projects they mention along with that question does not seriously concern me.--Amadscientist (talk) 22:58, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikiproject notes in articles

Pls see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Wikiproject notes in articles - The issues may be much bigger then just the note on the pages - However I believe the viability of the note its self is what we should talk about at this time.Moxy (talk) 23:53, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Goals for 2013

Maybe this is just a personal opinion, but I think one of the difficulties we might be having in a lot of areas is that the almost incredible number of articles we have, over 4 million?!, and comparatively few editors and active groups of editors that exist to deal with them, makes it harder for individual editors, or groups of editors, to focus much attention on some of the articles which would presumably be the most significant, important, or whatever word you might want to use to an encyclopedia. Maybe, I don't know, one thing that might help the groups have a bit more "direction" (and also, presumably, maybe cooperation, collaboration, and other things which might help stimulate Project-related activity) is to set some good, but reasonably achievable, goals for the next year. And, of course, the more people who help develop a more central article now, the less likely that article will be to need long-term continued attention in the same area, which would make it more likely that some of the these "central" articles might get more attention as well later. I have made a few proposals to that effect at the talk page of the Religion Project, and think that, in some cases, the increased focus on some of these more central articles might be a real and significant improvement to the effectiveness of such projects. Maybe, if several did have lists of articles they considered of primary importance to the project having a really "encyclopedic", or encompassing, treatment of a topic, either those articles might be tagged as "Core" importance or something similar, and project banners might even go so far as to point out the "core" articles needing most attention and/or ones that haven't been created yet. Maybe.

Anyway, I think it might be worth considering something along these lines for some groups, and would appreciate any input any of the rest of you might have regarding this topic, like whether it is really likely to be useful and/or, maybe, other steps which might be taken to further the goals of maybe increasing the effectiveness of WikiProjects. John Carter (talk) 19:12, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Some attainable goals/collaborations/ideas I'd suggest that could be done over the course of 2013 and would involve multiple WikiProjects:
  • Get all of WikiProject Biography's core articles up to at least B-class status and possibly double the number of GA/FAs (these biographies tend to overlap with a lot of projects)
  • Get articles about all countries, continents, and oceans up to at least B-class status and possibly double the number of GA/FAs
  • Hold a photography contest in which WikiProjects provide lists of articles that need images along with coordinates or other geographic information so that someone who lives or travels near the object can photograph it
  • Run some sort of Sourcing Drive using these categories and the various templates developed by the GOCE/Wikify projects; also breaking these unsourced articles down by WikiProject if feasible so we can hold a competition between projects
  • Develop a standardized, self-updating WikiProject membership list template possibly based on this tool that projects can voluntarily use to keep track of which members have been inactive on Wikipedia for a certain number of months/years and provide a database report on the largest WikiProjects by number of active users
  • Refresh the WikiProject Directory and develop some sort of automation to keep it updated
  • Buy John Carter a drink for all the work he's done for WikiProjects over the years
Those are my two cents. –Mabeenot (talk) 20:07, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
One thing I might like to see, if we have people to do it. There are a huge number of now public-domain encyclopedias out there, and I tend to think for a lot of "historical" biographies and the like they might be really useful in both helping establish what at least was consensus academic opinion at the time and also help develop as yet unstarted central articles and provide really good citations for a lot of others. Maybe if we could get some editors to add a few encyclopedic sources to WikiSource, where everyone could see them, that might be very useful. John Carter (talk) 23:28, 18 November 2012 (UTC)
I like the idea, and I have a suggested path forward: we should write up the concept in a subpage (maybe something like /Annual goals), with examples of possible goals, and send one of the newsletter-delivery bots around to the active projects to suggest that they talk about setting a goal for 2013. If they choose to, then they could list that goal on their project page and perhaps let us know (add a category for participating projects?) that would let us figure out whether anyone met their goals at the end of the year. What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:08, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Is there anyone interested in moving forward on any of these ideas? It would be nice to get the ball rolling this week. –Mabeenot (talk) 07:23, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
From my perspective, some of these ideas seem to be some of the most ambitious endeavors ever proposed in human history. They sound great but are they practical? Of course I want these things but this sounds like a fantastically complicated effort and there is no proposed planning for prioritization or coordinating these things. What are first steps? Where do these ideas go from here? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:23, 30 December 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Mabeenot that the WikiProject Directory should be automated somehow, and include more useful information for editors looking for projects to join. For example, an automatically updated member count for each project would be great, because it gives at least a rough idea of its size. For this one would probably have to standardize the member lists (which could be voluntary for the projects..), which is related to Mabeenot's suggestion.
Something else that I recall discussing here before is a rough measure of project activity. Here would be rough indicators: 1) number of pages with the WikiProject banner edited by WikiProject members in the last 2 months. 2) Number of edits to WikiProject subpages in the last 2 months. 3) Number of "active" WikiProject members. In theory, these could all be extracted from the database.. but I wouldn't know how to do it myself. Together they would be a nice profile of project activity, which would be useful to users looking for new projects. Mlm42 (talk) 15:58, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
There is an article in this week's The Signpost about the Wikimedia Movement having too much money - Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-12-31/In_the_media. I do not agree with that assessment, but I do think it is correct to say that there is money available for developing projects. Many Wikipedians support the use of donations to create tools for improving Wikipedia, and the kind of information you are requesting Mlm42 is the kind of thing which could be provided automatically by tools. If someone were to write a proposal requesting a tool or bot to organize this kind of information, and if it seemed to be something that a lot of people could use internationally, then I can imagine local Wikimedia chapters sponsoring the development of tools to meet community demands. I think this starts with a project proposal, then community feedback, then submission of the proposal to developers. How serious are you about your proposal? Do you really think that this is something that would benefit all WikiProjects and make it easier for people to collaborate? Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:49, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I can volunteer to write the proposal with a little guidance from someone who's done one of these before. I'm not sure what amount of funding would be needed or even who would be qualified to create these tools. I can definitely see this as a worthwhile endeavor that would benefit WikiProjects on the various languages of Wikipedia, the WP Council's efforts to organize and promote projects here on the English Wikipedia, the Signposts weekly interviews, and possibly even the research efforts of the WMF. How do we get started? –Mabeenot (talk) 18:24, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
I definitely think there is interest in such a tool; see also the discussions on this page from 2011 about WikiProject activity and measuring WikiProject success. The key to both of these seems to be some kind of tool that is able to filter edits by WikiProject articles and/or WikiProject members.
We already have Wikipedia:Database_reports/WikiProjects_by_changes; but I think people would want this information (as well as other activity indicators) incorporated into the WikiProject directory, which crucially is sorted by subject area, hence making it searchable by mere mortals.
So yes, I think this would improve collaboration, make it easier for editors to find new projects, and maybe even encourage some healthy competition between projects. :-) Mlm42 (talk) 09:49, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

WP:QXZ

The shortcut, WP:QXZ, which redirects to Template:Wikipedia ads (the talk page of which references this one) has been nominated for deletion. Your comments in the discussion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 January 8#Wikipedia:QXZ would be most welcome - doubly so if you can explain the origin of the "QXZ" acronym (if that is what it is). Thryduulf (talk) 00:19, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

WPCANADA

WP:CANADA is requiring the replacement of the banners of other projects without the consultation of the members of those projects. Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/Assessment says that WPTORONTO, WPMONTERAL, WPVANCOUVER, WPOTTAWA banners should be removed and replaced. There has never been such an agreement. Indeed when the WPCANADA banner was expanded with the city projects as a flagged additional project there was not supposed to be a replacement drive, as seen in the old page version. Why can't projects use their own banners, why are we forced to use WPCANADA's banner? When WPCANADA added these projects to their banner, it was without the consent of the projects in question, or even informing them. Now, WPCANADA seek to replace these banners without the consent or even informing them that this is even happening. -- 70.24.247.127 (talk) 05:00, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not seeing where CANADA says to replace banners for the four cities. In fact, Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/Assessmentthe page in your link seems to respect the four cities in their choice to have a separate rating. Binksternet (talk) 05:19, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Just would like to correct the IP's comments - dont like guess work or dishonesty. We have had many many talks on the matter starting in 2007 till 2010 - I will agree not all liked the idea of merged templates - but here we are years latter still moving forward with this idea. You will note that the City projects still have there banners.Moxy (talk) 16:56, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
A simple check of the talk archives for the four city projects show no notice given about replacement of their banners with the WPCANADA banner. The archives do show that the four city projects were added without the consent of the city projects. Further "Ones labelled Half Done may use either the Canada banner or their original banner." shows a replacement drive by WPCANADA, since it wouldn't be "half done" without being under a replacement drive. A discussion amongst only WPCANADA people without discussions with the various city projects would be a move without consultation of the city projects. -- 70.24.247.127 (talk) 19:40, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
We have even tlak about redirecting the tlak pages (to no avail) What is your intention with the post? Are you expeting thoses that participate and work on the projects to change eveything that has taken place since 2010- beause you came along and did not like what has happend?Moxy (talk) 20:36, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
The discussion on redirecting the talk pages DID NOT INFORM the city projects at all. That is clearly imperial hubris is nothing is. To eliminate the city project's own discussion areas without bothering to post a message saying that another project was about to destroy its community area is the height of high handedness. -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 09:48, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Could we get you to look more carefully before commenting - as again your assertion is wrong - Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ottawa#Proposal to redirect Canadian related project talk pages - Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vancouver/Archives/2#Proposal to redirect Canadian related project talk pages.Moxy (talk) 19:07, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
A similar discussion is archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 16#Scope of WikiProject United States (January 2011).
—Wavelength (talk) 17:27, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Previous discussion Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Council/Archive_15#WikiProject_Canada at the time the projects were originally added to WPCANADA shows no move towards replacement of the banners, but now the instructions at WPCANADA shows such at the very least, an implicit drive to replacement with the Half Done labelling. It was at the end of 2010, so after the so called discussions, which never occurred at the city projects (check their talk archives), and which came to the conclusion that the city project banners would not be replaced. If the drive from 2007-2010 is for replacement from a WPCANADA point of view, and without consultation of the city projects, and at the end of 2010, it was agreed to not replace the city project banners, but now we have a claim originating from 2007 that such a drive is taking place, how is the appropriate action? This shows years of non-consultative replacement by WPCANADA. -- 70.24.247.127 (talk) 20:00, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
What outcome are you looking for here - reverting of thousands of edits for many mnay editors over years? Some sort of actions for thoses that have actualy worked for and on the projects your tlaking about? Pls explain what YOU think the rest of us should do.Moxy (talk) 20:44, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
Clearly, the restoration of the city project banner on all High and Top importance articles, since they are almost always considered low importance by WPCANADA, and the city importances do not appear at all under the WPCANADA banner without expanding them, and are not colour coded unlike the WPCANADA importances, so clearly degrading the usefulness of those ratings since they have low visibility. I would like to do that for all mid-importance articles as well, but Top and High are should all be restored. Also all articles where the only taskforce activated is the city projects should revert to just having the city projects banner, since there's no point in a WPCANADA banner if the only project involved from the WPCANADA bouquet is that of the city projects. Since many of these city-only activated WPCANADA banner instances are not really of Canada wide concern, being primarily local concerns (hence only having the city switches activated) there's not really a point in having the WPCANADA banner. -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 09:48, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
As a person that participants and maintains this projects - I am simply not sure about the above assessment. Articles like Ottawa would be relevant to both projects as with many articles like List of National Historic Sites of Canada in Ottawa or National Capital Region (Canada). If projects like Ottawa had more involvement I would say this sound good - but this is not the case. If we were to have less templates on a talk page all ratings would be seen like at National Capital Region (Canada) - the problem we have is to many tags on talk pages that is confusing for our editors. Moxy (talk) 19:02, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
Articles like Ottawa have multiple taskforces signed on, so would still have the WPCANADA banner. But since it is the TOP-importance article for WPOTTAWA, it should have its own banner displayed. Many articles that are high or top importance to a city project end up with a low importance at the WPCANADA banner, and the city importances do not show up when the banners are collapsed, so it makes it appear to editors that those topics are not important to the city projects at all. This would mean that discussions about those articles might not have notice passed to the city projects (or WPCANADA for that matter, since it's rated as low importance) and might occur at say WPSHOPPINGMALLS. Shopping malls are important to the local community but in the national scheme of things are not important. The use of the WPCANADA banner obscures the importance to the local community, and makes it look like the locally focused wikiproject thinks it is unimportant as well, even if it's rated Mid or High, because under the collapsed banner view, that doesn't show through. Since this type of topic would only be important to the city project and not any other project on the WPCANADA banner, there's not real benefit from the WPCANADA banner as it just hides the relative importances, and makes the city project something that doesn't matter, thus reducing activity there, and reducing notice given to members of the project and WPCANADA as well, since those members of both the city project and WPCANADA won't have every page watchlisted, but a notice going to WPSHOPPINGMALLS may be missed by editors focused on local shopping malls. Whereas as a highly visible high-importance may garner a notice to the city wikiproject. -- 70.24.248.246 (talk) 06:53, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
As an editor who is uninvolved in Canadian affairs, it appears to me that there is a rather simple solution to this whole thing. Tweak the WPCanada banner so that the importance labels appear for each subproject/taskforce. You could even have a small color-coded swatch for each of these. My limited experience with the Canadian projects showed me that most of the subprojects are far from active, so having some cooperation in tagging and assessments would be beneficial. –Mabeenot (talk) 18:08, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for presenting a solution - Sounds more then logical to me - I would support this concepts.Moxy (talk) 18:13, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
  • That sounds good to me. If someone designs an elegant way to use colours or icons on the WPCanada banner to draw attention to higher importance ratings for city WikiProjects, I'll support it. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 01:40, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
WPMED's banner is set up to list separate priority/importance ratings per task force, and that might make a reasonable model. Scott Alter's the go-to guy for WPMED's banner, and he's really nice, if someone needs to ask for help doing the same thing. Otherwise, BannerMeta's talk page is probably the best place for such questions.
In general, WPCANADA can't force the removal of any other group's banner—but whether to have a separate banner is a decision for each of those groups, not just one person. If the unregistered editor believes that it's really important to have separate banners, he needs to go talk to each group and get the entire group to decide that they really want to maintain separate banners. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the words WAID. This page is on my watchlist, I wasn't following this specific discussion until my name popped up. I gave it a quick read through, so here's my outsider opinion looking in. Just to summarize, the "cities" projects believe that WPCANADA is trying to minimize the other projects' roles by using 1 encompassing banner instead of several. First, you need to consider the purpose of WP banners. Is it really to "advertise" the importance of the page to the project? How many readers not previously aware of WikiProjects look at just one banner on a random talk page, and think "this article is really important, so I should edit it"? My guess is close to zero. WP banners might lead a reader to the Wikipedia namespace world of WikiProjects. If a reader gets this far, they'll investigate the various projects and settle on what interests them. My belief is that the purpose of banners is two-fold. 1) to say that a specific group of people are interested on working on the article (so a reader can join, if interested) and 2) to automatically categorize the article by class and importance/priority. Existing members of a project are not searching through talk pages to find out which articles the project prioritizes - they go right to the assessment tables, categories, and toolserver.
So with that mindset, looking at the WPCANADA banner situation, I don't see why everything couldn't be within {{WPCANADA}}. Almost all articles within the scope of a Canadian city project are likely to be within the scope of WPCANADA. Functionality-wise (links to project pages and article categorization), there is no reason not to merge. But from an advertising perspective, a city project would be relegated to a task force line. With the formatting of {{WPBannerMeta}}, there is minimal customization available of a task force line. I'm not involved in the programming of that template, but I have used it extensively. AFAIK, the image on the left cannot be "dynamically" changed. However, the text stating "This article is supported by x (marked as x-importance)." can be customized. Since it takes any markup, a background color should be able to be applied to select text. So if you want "x-importance" to have a background with the corresponding importance color, that could be done (although I don't think this customization should be necessary to a project). --Scott Alter (talk) 05:19, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Lacking MOS

I apologize if this is the wrong place for this but, I will try to keep it brief in comparison to the resulting problems of a missing MOS. I made an attempt on the talkpage for the specific needed MOS here Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Dutch_and_German_surnames_van_.26_von The resulting problem without this seemingly minor guideline has left an opening for a particular editor to WP:hound my edits based on their misinterpretation of a guideline. I get it - when it comes to making little difference between upper and lower case "V" in a Dutch surname. In fact I totally agree with the other editor that stated "it is no big deal". The problem starts when after I either start an article or work within one and I use the proper lower case "v" that very same editor follows my tracks and contributes only by capping the "V" or changing namespaces the same way. Basically saying the proper way is in their mind "wrong" so they change it unilaterally to fit their mis-interpretation. The editor has repeatedly claimed that surname is "Anglicized" but has fallen short when asked for references to support their theory....JGVR (talk) 23:32, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

This sounds like it should be at WP:DRN or WT:MOS. You may find more help there. --Izno (talk) 01:28, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
I made a post at MOS and the other editor refuses to participate in DRJGVR (talk) 01:39, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
I was deliberate in my link. One of the ways to get help is to ask for people to weigh in on a question. Leaving a link at the main WT:MOS page that you would like feedback on your topic is a way to do that, so long as your request is neutrally worded. And if the user is really hounding you, then you will undoubtedly be able to get some help at ANI or elsewhere. This is still the wrong page to be asking for help at. --Izno (talk) 02:46, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

A-class cats

See Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2013_January_16#Empty_A-class_categories for a proposal to delete about a thousand empty A-class categories. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Project task force to do lists

You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:WPBannerMeta/hooks#Project task force to do lists. -- Trevj (talk) 11:15, 25 January 2013 (UTC) -- Trevj (talk) 11:15, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/New WikiProjects

I recommend that all watchers of this page also watch Wikipedia:Database reports/New WikiProjects.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:01, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Is this a wikiproject?

Wikipedia:Consumer Reports calls itself a wikiproject, but it does not manage any articles. Should it be reclassified? RockMagnetist (talk) 19:35, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The various cleanup projects don't manage articles either. Personally, I think that WikiDepartments should be revived as a distinction from WikiProjects. ARS, GOCE, FUN, WikiProject Templates, WikiProject Categories, WikiProject Redirects, WikiProject Deletion, would then be WikiDepartments. Thus Consumer Reports would become a WikiDepartment. But as there is no distinction currently, I don't see how this is different from various other things I just listed that are called WikiProjects. -- 70.24.246.233 (talk) 16:37, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
From WP:PROJ: "A WikiProject is a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia." Is there a group of people at that page who want to work together to improve Wikipedia? If so, then they're a WikiProject. It is not necessary for them to call themselves "WikiProject ____". (If they're not in the directory, you should feel free to add them.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:23, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Input needed on activating an importance parameter

Wikipedia:WikiProject Environment does not have the importance parameter activated. A number of editors have express surprise about it. See Template talk:WikiProject Environment and Template_talk:WikiProject_Environment#Display_importance for the !voting. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 07:22, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Some projects have intentionally chosen to leave out the importance paramater as it can lead to friction between editors with different opinions about an article's importance. "Importance" is inherently a subjective opinion. Roger (talk) 08:28, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
Yep. But it seems we have almost got a consensus but the admin is not altering the protected template because there has not been enough recent discussion. It seems we don't have many actives editors at WikiProject Environment so there is not a lot of discussion. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 08:51, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 02:09, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Redundant WikiProject?

I think the wiki project Wikipedia:WikiProject Kingdom of Hungary, that was created a couple of days ago, is unnecesary. We already have a wiki project named Wikipedia:WikiProject Hungary and I don't see why we would create a wiki project for each form of government of a country.

Even now Wikipedia:WikiProject Hungary is kind of inactive, I don't think we should split it TransylvaniaRomania (talk) 16:04, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Kingdom of Hungary was started by User:AnyWay5000, who may be unaware of the existence of Wikipedia:WikiProject Hungary. Please mention this anomaly to that editor.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:44, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
I doubt it, cause all the articles that he included into the project already belonged to Wikipedia:WikiProject Hungary. So he most probably saw the banner on those talk pages. TransylvaniaRomania (talk) 17:22, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
A WikiProject is a group of people, not a subject area. If there are two groups of people, then they may continue to work separately or they may merge together, exactly as they choose. If there aren't two groups of people, then there actually aren't two WikiProjects. There's just someone pretending to be a WikiProject (very probably because he doesn't realize that a WikiProject is defined as being "a group of people" and not "a page that says 'WikiProject' at the top"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:22, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Do you recommend me to ask User:AnyWay5000 to leave his new single user- project and join Wikipedia:WikiProject Hungary, where there are more participants? Is it a appropriate action if I remove the banners that he added to different articles? TransylvaniaRomania (talk) 22:32, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
I would like to always assume good faith, but I would like to point out that there is a dispute ongoing at Talk:History of Vojvodina which originated with a user trying to remove WP:Hungary from the page. This has escalated to a bunch of socks adding various WPs willy-nilly to the page and/or trying again to remove WP:Hungary. And, strangely, about the same time these socks appeared, User:AnyWay5000 appears and creates WP:Kingdom of Hungary as his first edit... and it promptly gets added to Talk:History of Vojvodina. (Apparently the Serbians would prefer that to WP:Hungary.) Sigh. Brianyoumans (talk) 04:29, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
FYI, this is now the subject of a thread at WP:ANI. Regards, Peacemaker67 (send... over) 05:41, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
Specifically, this thread.  — Statυs (talk, contribs) 05:51, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
I have now nominated Wikipedia:WikiProject Kingdom of Hungary at WP:MFD. Regards, Peacemaker67 (send... over) 02:07, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Request for comment on physical determinism

To clarify the usage of physical determinism, I have posted a request for comment. Brews ohare (talk) 16:59, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

WikProject category categorization

Spurred by recent discussion about how to categorize the eponymous WikiProject categories (Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Science#Parentage and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 January 24#Category:WikiProject Medicine descendant projects), I'd like to propose an improvement to the WikiProject categorization within Category:WikiProjects. Currently, WikiProjects are categorized by a combination of "type/descriptive" (as in Category:Science WikiProjects) and parentage. Some projects can be found within a descriptive category, while others require searching through categories of other WikiProjects to look for your target project. I believe that an eponymous category for a project should only contain content that a project would like to manage...a completely separate project should not necessarily be within a different project's category hierarchy. Not all projects claim to have "parents" or "children", but "related" projects. Often, when a project's category needs to be categorized, it is just dumped in the main category of another project.

Rather than forcing a project to have parents and children to facilitate categorization, why not make categories for the headings in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. Essentially, the Directory is a categorization of projects by topic, so why not have the categorization parallel this? We already have many of the topic categories in use (Category:Art WikiProjects‎, Category:Culture WikiProjects‎, Category:Environment WikiProjects‎, Category:Geographical WikiProjects‎, Category:History WikiProjects‎, Category:Humanities WikiProjects‎, to name a few). This way, all of the projects categories can be easily found by category, no guessing is required as to parentage, and every project can have control of all content within their project's eponymous category. I realize this would be a large undertaking, but as the projects are poorly categorized now, it is something that can be slowly phased in, one topic area at a time. --Scott Alter (talk) 04:08, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

If there is a "parent" WikiProject with a category (e.g. Category:WikiProject Fauna), the new category should be made a subcategory of that as well.

I'm just providing this for context, not in support of any particular viewpoint. RockMagnetist (talk) 16:18, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment - I think reducing clutter in eponymous categories is not a very important issue. As much clutter occurs because there is no consistency in choosing what should appear in the parent category - the wikiproject main page, the eponymous category, or both.
I think the biggest advantage of this proposal is that it leaves projects free to choose the most appropriate categorization. For example, in the Directory there is a table of Geosciences wikiprojects, but there is no WikiProject Geosciences and therefore no Category:WikiProject Geosciences. But is this is worth the effort involved? First, a lot of wikiprojects should be notified about this discussion so that there is a clear consensus for change. Then, if there was consensus, someone would need to do the recategorizing. That's a lot of work. RockMagnetist (talk) 01:33, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
Any other thoughts? I don't think it is a major issue, but it is something that occasionally comes up. And each project should be able to decide how to organize its eponymous category. I don't want to change how projects organize their own pages - just how the eponymous categories are categorized. Therefore, this shouldn't require the consensus of all WikiProjects. I think it is akin to reorganizing the Directory - something that is within the scope of the Council and discussion should be here. If no one else has any suggestions, I may just be bold and give it a shot within some of Category:Science WikiProjects as a start - specifically the health-related projects, which I contribute to. --Scott Alter (talk) 00:40, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

I just gave this a shot with Category:Health WikiProjects, which has a parent of Category:Science WikiProjects. If you look at Category:Science WikiProjects, to separate the subcategories from projects, I made the sort key for subcategories start with " ", while the main project for the category starts with a "*". Any comments? --Scott Alter (talk) 05:49, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

  • Comment. As an observation, the issue is really how to define a top category for these. I'm not sure how many editors would really try to navigate this set of categories. Categories are there to assist in article navigation and we are not talking articles here. So we could probably do something, but is it needed? Vegaswikian (talk) 07:33, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
  • I think this is fine. I wonder if we could use something like this to replace the rather complicated directory. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:45, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
I don't think this change is absolutely needed, and I won't spend time going through the hundreds (or thousands) of project categories. I'm acting now because a minor issue came up with WikiProject categorization and there was no advise or precedence. In all likelyhood, few, if any people actually look in Category:WikiProjects. I'll make a slight modification to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/WikiProject#Project categories so categorization within parent projects is not required. --Scott Alter (talk) 06:06, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Are WikiProjects Language Specific or do they Overlap?

Hi there. I've been engaging in discussion with the WikiProject Medicine community and have a couple questions that pertain to the logistical landscape and ability to intercommunicate with specific WikiProjects in different languages within Wikipedia. I'm posing the question here because I'm assuming the Council has a broad view of the community landscape and you may have gotten these sort questions before.

But before that, here is some background on my experiment, which I hope to build-out with community buy-in. The project is intended to collaborate with others to surface and generate knowledge as it relates to Regional Variations in Standards of Care; regions are intended to be country-specific and standards of care means how disease states are tackled and treated in different regions. Many countries view and tackle disease states differently (whether it be due to cultural, societal, economic or other reasons, and this type of information is not readily available for all to view in one standardized place). One can think of this looking something similar to the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, but on a global scale. I've created mock-up articles that model the inclusion of Regional information and have vetted it past the community in WikiProject Medicine. Here are the mock-up articles I created: Epidemiology of Hypertension, Diagnosis of Hypertension, Management of Hypertension. In doing so, articles could potentially build out to discern the variations in health care that exist by country and by disease state. The questions below will help me better understand the constructs within Wikipedia that would allow one to connect Wikipedians from different countries on one specific effort.

1. Is WikiProject Medicine specific to the English Version of Wikipedia?
2. Or put another way, does each language have its own version of WikiProject Medicine?
3. Or does WikiProject Medicine span across all Wikipedia language domains?
4. Is there a tagging method that allows for people within those languages to partake in a regionally specific, yet globally collective project?

My assumption, in the above, is that most Wikipeidans supporting a certain Wikipedia language domain currently reside, or at least better understand the variations, within that specific region of the world, respective of language.

I appreciate your any feedback and guidance I can get to move forward. Thanks. GT67 (talk) 17:14, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like an interesting project. I hope you're aware that there are lots of inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles - although we're constantly working to improve them!
1. Yes. Have a look at the bottom of the navigation bar on the left of WikiProject Medicine - you'll see links to medicine wikiprojects in other languages.
2. See 1.
3. See 1.
4. None that I'm aware of.
RockMagnetist (talk) 17:23, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
They're all separate groups, and most languages don't have one. However, in the particular instance of WPMED, some of the main editors have formed Wiki Project Med Foundation, a separate organization with more of an international focus, which you can contact at Meta, which is the WMF website for interwiki collaboration. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Possible Bluegrass project

Dear editors: I have been looking at a lot of articles about Bluegrass music and musicians, and there are a large number with few or no references. I am thinking of organizing a Wikiproject for Bluegrass music to improve some of these articles and encourage the creation of some obvious missing ones. There are currently about 500 articles linked to the Bluegrass music article.

I have put messages on the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Country Music and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Roots music talk pages to see if the folks at these related projects have any objections or suggestions. I've also collected some information about Bluegrass topics on a user page at User talk:Anne Delong/Bluegrass Topics. Is there anything else that I should do before I put in a project proposal to see if other editors are interested? —Anne Delong (talk) 01:10, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide.
—Wavelength (talk) 01:22, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

WikiWomen in Louisiana

Hi there. Are there any women editors from Louisiana? Please contact me if you can! SarahStierch (talk) 13:49, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

See Category:Female Wikipedians and Category:Wikipedians in Louisiana.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:19, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
See User:Ashleyxox3 and User:Pinkmango00.
—Wavelength (talk) 18:04, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
[I searched the category intersection by using http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php.
—Wavelength (talk) 19:31, 26 February 2013 (UTC)]

WP:KIS label

Your WP:Keep It Simple label, {{User label WPCouncil}} is in danger of being deleted. See (Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 February 6#Template:User_label.) If you still want it, you may wish to move it to project space, perhaps a redirect page Template:Label_WPCouncil or Template:Label_WikiProject_Council by placing {{db-move|Template:User label WPCouncil|[[Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 February 6#Template:User_label]]}} above the redirect. Also see {{user label}} for technical details. Feel free to review my planning page, User:PC-XT/KIS, and talk there if you have questions. PC-XT (talk) 01:38, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Followup: the result of the discussion was move to {{WP:KIS/WPCouncil}} -PC-XT+ 06:42, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

User namespace for SMU Constitutional and Administrative Law Wikipedia Project

You are invited to join the discussion at User talk:Smuconlaw#SMU Constitutional and Administrative Law Wikipedia Project. -- Trevj (talk) 13:20, 28 February 2013 (UTC) -- Trevj (talk) 13:20, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Should the "Wikipedia:WikiProject" prefix be reserved for "full projects/sub projects/task groups" or any gathering?

A university course was recently started, with their "course" page set up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket and Englishness. It has since been moved (once by me, then again by others) to end up at Wikipedia:Englishness and Cricket. During the discussion, where I expressed a view that the "Wikipedia:WikiProject" prefix should only be used by "full" or "offical" WikiProjects with a class/quality/importance article tracking system, not just any short-term ad-hoc grouping of people wanting to edit similar articles. The dissenting view quoted Wikipedia:WikiProject which states "A WikiProject is a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia" with no real mention about restricting it to any formal structure or style.

My question, is should the 'Wikipedia:WikiProject" prefix be restricted to the more "formal" WikiProjects, or should it remain as it is at the moment, where proposals to Council are recommended, but not essential, and any group can be created as a WikiProject? Given the many tools that are in some way WikiProject related (WP:1.0, Svick's cleanup lists, dabsolver etc), is there any benefit or cost to having adhoc "non-article tracking" projects in that prefix? Or are most of these tool "opt-in" anyway, so it doesn't matter? Having a dedicated "education" namespace might help for the university course pages, and it is in development at Wikipedia:Course pages and Wikipedia:Assignments for student editors, but it seems like a fairly complicated process, compared to just starting a page as a pseudo WikiProject. (Note, although this university course has also been involved in some ANI/BITE/OWN/NPOV/RS issues, this thread should ignore all of that and concentrate solely on the topic page naming, and whether is is acceptable or should be explicitly prevented. ANI is thataway) The-Pope (talk) 03:29, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Oppose.--Amadscientist (talk) 03:34, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Agree that "the "Wikipedia:WikiProject" prefix should only be used by "full" or "offical" WikiProjects" however it should be noted that some major projects (particularly umbrella projects) do not have class/quality/importance tracking systems. --Kleinzach 04:26, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Define "official" and how that will be determined.--Amadscientist (talk) 04:30, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Indeed. Who is to decide this matter?! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 04:57, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Definitions of a WikiProject already exist. --Kleinzach 03:15, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
Yes they do. And they define a project as a collaboration of editors...not pages. If possible please answer the question posed by editors. If not, I will take it you haven't thought this all the way through.--Amadscientist (talk) 03:24, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
Oppose. This is far from the first time that an educational project has been placed in the Wikiproject space: see WP:MMM and WP:NRG for instance, both of which (especially the first) attracted a fair amount of publicity and good vibes without anyone once questioning the fact that they were in Wikiproject space. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 04:56, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the purpose would be. If the intended actions would somehow change, it might make sense, but if the goal of someone looking to improve articles and discuss the validity of sources or the weight of concepts cited in articles, it really makes no difference what landing page organizes the activity. The only reason to have a dedicated page of any kind is to collect the thoughts in one spot so people don't have to visit each editors talk pages individually to organize the activity. Maybe the "project manager" or initiator could use their talk page as the focus of the organization of thought, but if they drop out of the project and the other members want to continue I think a separate project page makes more sense. I don't see any compelling reason to make organizing groups of editors more complex than it needs to be. I would add that the only "official" projects in my opinion are initiated by WMF along the lines of the visual editor or a redesign of the features. Everything else is ad hoc, regardless of the scope of the editor's vision. That's my 2 cents. --Oline73 (talk) 12:50, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Oppose No need. I like the open definition, and unless someone can demonstrate the benefits of a more restrictive definition, I can't see why we'd change it. The Interior (Talk) 03:02, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. We already have plenty of esoteric rules, if we're going to adopt more then they should at least solve a problem. Kevin Gorman (talk) 07:36, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment I am a Wikipedian in Residence and frequently organizations ask me what kind of relationship they should have with Wikipedia. For my own organization, I set up Wikipedia:Consumer Reports and just yesterday for another organization I set up Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Federal Government Legislative Data. I am aware of other organizations modeling their engagement with Wikipedia on the WikiProject model, such as with Khan Academy's Wikipedia:GLAM/smarthistory. I often tell organizations that are planning on doing a project on Wikipedia then they need to be transparent, and their describing their activities as a WikiProject and inviting the community to give feedback through the same seems best to me. If anyone wants to talk more then contact me. I am not sure whether or not the prefix should be used in such cases. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:01, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Answering a few of the queries above... the problem I see is twofold, confusion and ease of bot/tool work. We don't allow users to have BOT or companies names, as it causes confusion, regardless of whether the editor is editing in a botlike manner. The bot/tool thing might not be real. I've asked for input from those at WT:BRFA, but nothing yet. By "official" wikiprojects I mean those projects that are primarily concerned with improving wikipedia, not passing a course. Most have some or all of the "usual" characterists: templates, class and/or importance ratings, article lists, talk pages, listed on the WikiProject Council directory or in the cat tree. Of course, some of the "task" projects like WP:GOCE don't have their own class/importance ratings, but I'm not trying to rule out old projects. I'm also not here to debate whether or not Nicki Minaj or WikiProject Western Sahara Territories should be created, that is for the proposals page. I'm not here to argue whether all extant projects should be setup the same, I'm here to debate whether there should be something in Wikipedia:Course pages and Wikipedia:Assignments for student editors that suggests the use of a different workspace, something like Education:Course name or Course:Course name, or even Wikipedia:Course name rather than Wikipedia:WikiProject Course name. My experience with "official" WikiProjects is that I find them an incredibly useful way to sub-categorise articles, without having to do vast recursive catscans. I don't agree with many that a project talk page is the only useful thing about WikiProjects and the main test of it's "activity". Having ad-hoc course projects in the WikiProjects doesn't affect that at all, unless you are trying to do complete lists of WikiProjects. And maybe the WikiProject prefix is already heavily infiltrated with ad-hoc projects and maybe no-one will ever try to do a full list of WikiProjects (the toolserver based one for WP:1.0 is woefully incorrect/duplicitous). That's why I started the discussion and why I've asked the bot guys/gals to comment. The-Pope (talk) 03:10, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
  • The bot stuff is an almost non-existent "problem", especially if they don't tag articles or create cats. If they're working together, they are a WikiProject, no matter what name they choose for themselves. WP:New Page Patrol is a WikiProject, despite the "non-standard" name, and so is this group. It's just an intentionally temporary one.
    That said, if asked, my advice to them would be to work as a task force under a relevant project or to use the typical educational-style pages, so that there's no time wasted with administrative overhead (e.g., messages from bots that are delivered to all pages (except subpages) beginning with WT:WikiProject *). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:45, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose and I echo The Interior here, unless someone can demonstrate the benefits of a more restrictive definition, I can't see why we'd change it. It really is a case of instruction creep with no perceivable benefit to anyone. Projects can do as little or as much as they like. Many that call themselves "WikiProjects" do not assess for either quality or importance. Many do not do bot runs. The only bot messages/pages that WikiProject Opera subscribes to are the possible new articles, article alerts and unreferenced BLPs. I can't remember the last time we received a bot message that was sent to all WikiProjects regardless of whether they have "subscribed" or not. Frankly, putting an educational project in ordinary Wikipedia space, is even more misleading. That is normally used for essays, guidelines, processes etc., not to serve as places for editors to get together and plan their work {see Wikipedia:Project namespace). Having said that, education projects should be encouraged to use a "course page" set-up instead because it has some extra features and potential benefits, but it's their choice if they choose to call it a WikiProject. The class that started all this, Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket and Englishness (now Wikipedia:Englishness and Cricket), were not bannering article talk pages, or "competing for members" with WikiProject Cricket. If the latter project is worried about confusion, simply add a hatnote to your project page, and possibly the class's page as well. I would suggest, however, that whatever the student project is called, Template:Educational assignment should be added to the talk pages of articles they're working on. Voceditenore (talk) 08:44, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

WikiWork

Per a request on my talk page and a discussion following Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-25/WikiProject report, I have created User:WP 1.0 bot/WikiWork, a subproject of the WP 1.0 bot and a new template that will output several WikiWork-related pieces of data for every WP 1.0 enabled WikiProject:

  • the project's composite WikiWork score (for example, 100392)
  • the project's relative WikiWork score (or the omega as I referred to it in the docs, for example, 4.5)
  • the number of articles checked for WikiWork (i.e., not including images/disambiguations/etc).

I'd love it if you took a look and let me know your thoughts. Still very much a beta product; just something I whipped together in an afternoon, so bug-hunters are welcome. Cheers, —Theopolisme (talk) 05:13, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Little bit of confusion: the idea is that WP 1.0 bot will automatically incorporate the WW info into project tables the next time it runs; no one needs to manually transclude anything, unless you want the data to appear somewhere else in the project (I dunno, maybe a countdown to 0 relative WikiWork or something like that). —Theopolisme (talk) 13:53, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Looks good. I'm glad that the Signpost article spurred some activity on implementing WikiWork. –Mabeenot (talk) 02:51, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
For those unfamiliar with this, it gives you a 'countdown to having all your work done' (all the articles within your group's scope are featured; zero points is winning), and an average score for all your articles based on their status. A couple of groups have been using it for competitions between task forces. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Limit to # of wikiprojects per article

A user at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_United_States#Homosexuality_in_the_Batman_franchise suggested that there is a "limit" of 2 or 3 Wikiprojects per article. Is this true? WhisperToMe (talk) 19:44, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

There is no limit on the number of editors who may edit an article, so it seems reasonable that there would be no limit on the number of WikiProjects overseeing an article. See WP:OWN#Multiple-editor ownership.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:44, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
There is no limit "per article". The question you asked, however, was about the scope of a project. I disagree largely with WP:US's expansion of the past few years, and this is probably an article that shouldn't be tagged with the banner. The rule of thumb that Le Deluge threw out is probably a good one when the topic you are considering is not a "main" topic. I would judge HS in Batman not a "main" topic myself. YMMV. Ultimately, it comes down to the consensus judged by the users in the WikiProject, so take this comment with a grain of salt. --Izno (talk) 20:49, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
(edit conflict) :Each wikiproject chooses on its own whether to include something in its scope; I don't know of any policy that requires wikiprojects to remove an article from its scope just because other projects have it in theirs. The article Elizabeth II, for example, is now in 18 different projects. We do have a policy that says if you have three or more project banners you should collapse them using Template:WBPS, but that's not a big deal. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 20:52, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
See Do ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ or are ‘two heads better than one?’ | Abdul Latif Sultan - Academia.edu (Academia.edu) for possibly helpful information.
—Wavelength (talk) 21:00, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
There is absolutely no limit. Your group can support whatever articles it wants; the other group can support whatever it wants. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Discussions

I have proposed merging the two apparently moribund Occult and Parapsychology projects on the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Occult#Merge discussion, and would welcome any input. Also, there is discussion regarding the deletion of the project banner of WikiProject Toronto at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2013 March 21#Template:WikiProject Toronto, which also might benefit from some editors experienced in the life cycle of WikiProjects. John Carter (talk) 20:13, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Water supply and sanitation by country

Hello, per WT:WikiProject Water supply and sanitation by country, it was decided to merge the project into WP: WikiProject Water as a workgroup/taskforce, could someone please carry this out? -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 05:36, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

You are asking for what could be a lot of work and a non-project participant probably could not do it in the way that is best. This kind of task should be done by project participants so that it can be done the way that the community wants it to be done. If anyone needs help executing this, then please come here and state the problem so that this board can give advice.
It starts with moving pages and updating links. Is that a problem? Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:11, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

WP: U2

I am attempting to re-activate u2 project, and i am trying to ping some of the older members. Can someone help me on that?  Miss Bono (zootalk) 18:58, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Workgroup vs Taskforce

What's the difference between a workgroup and a taskforce? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 12:11, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

There is no defined difference. These are not standardized terms. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:08, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
Task force is kind of standardized per its use in the banner template. I'm not sure I've ever seen work(ing) group on Wikipedia used in this fashion. --Izno (talk) 17:44, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
People normally use "workgroup" to indicate a temporary taskforce that isn't bothering with setting up a page. For example, imagine that you needed to fix a few hundred WP:DEADREFs. You might get three or four volunteers out of your bigger group and ask them to work together to resolve it. That's a "workgroup". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:18, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Requesting advice regarding proposed overhaul of an inactive WikiProject

OK, I'm not really sure of the protocols here. I am considering, basically, attempting to revise/revive the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for encyclopedic merit to turn it into something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, but with a slightly broader scope, specifically, to include at least basic article reference lists of all articles which are included in encyclopedias whose scope closely mirrors that of some of our WikiProjects, not just those that are to this point missing. I think having some clear ideas of what material is out there in generally highly reliable, generally more or less academic source, regardless of the stated subject of that encyclopedia, would probably make things a lot easier for all of us in determining what material we should have relating to those subjects. Maybe. But, honestly, I have no clear idea what sort of steps to take to make such fairly significant changes in this inactive project. Any ideas? John Carter (talk) 18:51, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I would recommend starting anew, since the old Wikipedians for Decency has a quite contentious history that you simply do not need to carry around. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 21:07, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
I would also recommend either creating a new project or attempting to revise the missing encyclopedic articles project instead. The Wikipedians for encyclopedic merit project was a very different entity from the one you are envisioning. –Mabeenot (talk) 03:11, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Developing infrastructure for WikiProjects

Mr.Z-bot's "Task 3" provides monthly statistics of pageviews for articles within the scope of a WikiProject. This example from WikiProject Medicine demonstrates what it does. I think this would be useful for many projects, but for the past couple of years Mr. Z has been busy and the code needs updating. Currently the request queue to include new WikiProjects is down.

There are some problems which are unlikely to be resolved by volunteers, and programming problems in seem especially prone to staying unresolved. I think that this might be a problem which could be resolved by paying someone to solve it. I have no one in particular in mind who can do this, but there is a grant-requesting process at meta:Grants:Index. Perhaps any of you saw this week in The Signpost that the Wikimedia Foundation just finished their first round of issuing grants and they are looking for further grant applications.

I was thinking of making a grant request to fix Mr. Z's bot's problem, and perhaps this could be among a set of outstanding program requests of interest to the WikiProject Council. If the grant were awarded, then the funds could sit until someone steps up to complete the task and takes the funds. How do others feel about this? Does anyone have any other ideas of outstanding tasks for WikiProjects which need automation and for which the software needs updating? Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:11, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Sweet! Here are some other tasks that would be great for a grant request. We discussed how nice this stuff would be but nobody acted upon any of them. –Mabeenot (talk) 17:07, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
It looks like you and I started talking about this a few months ago and never followed through. I just emailed you to request a voice or Skype chat; we can talk more here also. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:38, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Non-traditional uses for WikiProjects

Related to developing infrastructure for WikiProjects is developing infrastructure for metrics. The original purpose of WikiProjects was to create a community space for collaboration, but in the course of doing that, people developed tools based on the WikiProject talk page templates which generate interesting metrics which are useful outside the context of community collaboration. I can imagine that someone might want to know something about a class of articles and want metrics from them, and for that same set of articles there might not be an active community to support a WikiProject. In fact, some very popular sets of articles are contained in some very dead WikiProjects, because for whatever reasons, people who develop those articles are not interested in meeting each other in a WikiProject.

Some of the useful tools include Mr.Z-bot's statistics tables and User:WP 1.0 bot's article quality and importance rankings. So far as I know, there is no way to access the benefits of those tools outside the context of applying WikiProject tags to articles, and it is improper to apply WikiProject tags without a WikiProject, and it is improper to set up a WikiProject without a community. I am stating this to follow up on the above proposal about infrastructure development for WikiProjects. Poor User:WP 1.0 bot even has an obsolete name now, because since 2007 when that bot was made for WP:WP 1.0, this bot has become useful and fundamental to the Wikipedia editing experience in ways not anticipated. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:24, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

I frequently use the lists of popular pages by WikiProject to correct errors in the most popular articles. At the present time, I am in the midst of proceeding through the articles listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Biology/Popular pages. (Ideally, some editors in the respective WikiProjects will see my revisions and will be motivated to continue such revisions for other articles overseen by the respective WikiProjects but not included in the lists of popular pages.)
—Wavelength (talk) 15:26, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for sharing. That is exactly what I mean - those lists are tied to a WikiProject, but anyone can use them regardless of whether they are a member or supporter of the WikiProject. I agree with you that activity on Wikipedia articles encourages additional activity on other articles. These tables - like this Mr. Z-bot one you shared - are very encouraging and provocative. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:46, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Rating articles without WikiProjects

How do you assess the rating of a page if it does not fall under the scope of any WikiProject? Numbermaniac - T- C 05:36, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

The issue with not having a WikiProject is that a "WikiProject" is currently defined as a community, not a subject area, and I am considering whether a WikiProject should be a place for organizing a subject area even if there is no community. WikiProjects have an advantage unrelated to the existence of a community, and that advantage is access to some bot tools. There are two direct answers to your question:
  1. According to guidelines, one does not assess the rating of a page if it is not in a WikiProject, because any ratings template (Template:WPBannerMeta) is supposed to put an article under the watch of a WikiProject. So without a WikiProject, the rules say do not rate a page.
  2. In practice the quality ratings system is universal, so pages in a subject area could be rated for a "WikiProject" which had no community. Although WikiProjects have the option of defining their quality and importance standards, and instructions say that they should, in practice ratings can be intuitively assigned or based on general rather than WikiProject-specific guidelines. It is not necessary to have a community (which is a requirement of founding a WikiProject) to have an interest in knowing what quality the articles are in a given subject area and which articles are most important, so I assert that it is possible and can be useful to create community-less WikiProjects if they want access to robot metric benefits.
Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:44, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
In the interest of ensuring that each article is overseen by at least one WikiProject, I propose a two-step strategy.
  • By consulting the categories in which the article is categorized, and by consulting the WikiProjects categorized in Category:WikiProjects, someone can find at least one appropriate WikiProject and invite its members to oversee the article.
  • If, after a reasonable length of time, the article still is not overseen by any WikiProject, then it can be overseen by a new one, Wikipedia:WikiProject Miscellaneous.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:36, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
Can we pull together a database report of all the articles that have not been tagged with a WikiProject banner? That would give us a clue as to how many articles have been overlooked for all these years and whether there are any patterns that suggest specific topic areas have been neglected. –Mabeenot (talk) 15:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

A few quick comments:

  1. Can somebody give an example of an article that doesn't fall within the scope of a WikiProject? Generally, when I see this claim, the discussion ends with "Huh, I didn't know that WikiProject existed".
  2. Where is this guideline that says not to assess articles that don't fall under a WikiProject?
  3. Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#Statistics says that 4,108,532 articles out of the current 4,208,773 articles have been tagged. That's more than 97% of articles.
  4. WP:WikiProject Contents (elderly and inactive) could probably be used as a project of last resort, but I believe that the 1.0 team has their own banner for that purpose—and also that it hasn't been needed, because there's always been a WikiProject that covers articles when we've been asked. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Wavelength, Mabeenot, WhatamIdoing, thanks for listening to me.
@Wavelength, my problem is not a complete lack of WikiProjects. I agree with WhatamIdoing that most articles have a tag. I do agree with you that all articles should be a included within some WikiProject, and that perhaps newly created articles should in the future come with some default tag or system to ensure that they are sorted. Right now they are not and this is a problem, but that is not my most serious present concern.
@Mabeenot, I think that most neglect happens not because of lack of WikiProject tagging, but that perhaps more specific WikiProject tagging would keep articles less neglected. This is sort of interesting to me, and part of my present concern, but not the biggest problem.
@WhatamIdoing, you understand the scope of WikiProject templates but your questions also miss my concern and it would not be useful for me to answer them. I still want your input if I may have it.
Here is my practical problem - I made WP:WikiProject Dietary Supplements to get data about articles which would go in that project. I now think that this is contrary to existing WikiProject rules, but I still want a legitimate way to get that data.
For now, please ignore that I created the WikiProject improperly; rules say that I should only make WikiProjects with community support, and that perhaps this project should have been a task force of WikiProject Pharmacolgy or WikiProject Medicine. I inappropriately made a WikiProject without seeking community support first and I may have misplaced it by making it independent rather than a task force, and I am sorry for that but think it is not such a big problem. I will fix it when I decide next steps.
The fundamental problem is that putting articles in a WikiProject seems to be the easiest way to get data about them presented centrally. I made the WikiProject because I wanted the benefits of having the quality and importance ratings table which User:WP 1.0 bot makes and I wanted the publicly-visible history of page views to each article which User:Mr.Z-bot makes. Both of these tools look at all the articles within a WikiProject and I do not know how to access their benefits otherwise.
I do not think it is unreasonable to want to see some metrics for a coherent class of articles like dietary supplements, but it is against current WikiProject rules to set up a WikiProject or task force without having a community interested in developing those articles. If it were possible I would like the metrics benefits without setting up a WikiProject, but also I do not think that Wikipedia is so harmed by having a dead dietary supplements project which just gives metrics. Plenty of other dead Wikiprojects do the same thing.
Right now, I would like feedback on two points:
  1. How do you feel about my having set up a WikiProject for the purpose of collecting metrics rather than for the purpose of developing a community? I feel that in the case of dietary supplements this should slide because that is a topic of sufficient breadth of interest, but I also think that it would be bad if everyone who wanted to collect metrics on 100 articles made a WikiProject to do so.
  2. To what extent do you think that there should be broader discussion here about whether it is okay for people seeking metrics to do so through WikiProject infrastructure? Is it so bad to make a dead Wikiproject on a popular topic like dietary supplements as an advertisement to attract community or to host guidelines on editing such articles?
If any of you wants to chat by phone, Skype, or Google Hangout then I would do so to be more efficient, but I also want to be transparent here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:24, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
Is your ultimate question something like "What is the (1.0 team's) quality rating for every page listed in Category:Dietary supplements or its immediate subcats?"
You could make a task force if you wanted that data updated every week or so, but for a one-off (or a couple-of-off) data collection, I'd ask a technically minded person to just run the data for you. It's not a very complicated task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 15 April 2013 (UTC)
Yes, you understand. I want regularly updated data and it seems like User:Mr.Z-bot gives that to any task force or WikiProject. I am here on this board because some tools are for WikiProjects. If a technically-minded person could teach me how to collect the data outside of setting up a WikiProject/task force, then I might do that, because it seems inappropriate to setup an unpopulated forum or to create and apply categories and talk page templates primarily for the purpose of using data tools. Do you know someone in particular with whom I should talk? Otherwise, I think I will keep using the WikiProject I made, write a description of what I am doing and why, and then continue to get feedback about how this should be done. My needs are satisfied but I am not sure that everyone should do it like I am doing it. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:15, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
I am unaware of any policy or guideline discouraging the use of a WikiProject for the sole purpose that you have described, and am interested in seeing a link to such a policy or guideline, along with an excerpt of the particular passage discouraging such use. It seems to be a harmless use, even if it were adopted by other editors in other WikiProjects also.
I have edited these pages by adding a link to "Wikipedia:WikiProject Dietary Supplements".
—Wavelength (talk) 15:18, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
The existing rules say that Wikipedias are for communities. I assume that also means that they are not for non-community projects, like metrics accounting. On the main page of Wikipedia:WikiProject, "A WikiProject is a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia." and "Creating a WikiProject is the process of creating a group of people who want to work together." On the WP:TASKFORCE page, "The first question to ask is whether your project is of sufficient size to warrant having task forces".
I started thinking about this because of the dietary supplement project. Someone told me that since I did not have a community, it could not be a WikiProject. But then I looked at Task Force guidelines and those are only for communities also, so it seems that this cannot by current policy be a task force. I would like to just leave it where it is unless anyone has a reason to do otherwise, and also I would participate in talks about what policy there should be about people wanting to use the WikiProject metrics tools when there is no active WikiProject. There are lots of dead Wikiprojects, so I wonder if WP:SUPPLEMENTS can just be the same as those until policies are reconsidered.
Thanks for sharing this on other WikiProject pages. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:07, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
I suggest explaining the situation at the main page and/or redirecting the talk page to a real WikiProject, but your pages are unlikely to hurt anyone. If you only want it for a specific period of time, then you could request deletion when you're done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:10, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Ordering of wikiprojects

Is there any recommendations or guidelines regarding the ordering of wikiprojects on the talk page? It seems natural that they should be organized by importance. Within an importance level, there are several possible choices: alphabetical, "common sense", first-tagged, etc. Jason Quinn (talk) 19:55, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Nobody really bothers. It's not important. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Update to Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers

Svick has kindly updated Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers to list the number of active users watching a WikiProject page, rather than just all accounts. This has a significant effect on a couple of the older projects' ranking. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:12, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Dispute over adding WikiProject template to article talk page

List of Wikipedia controversies includes a section about a controversy involving the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia. The article is clearly within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Scientology, of which I am a long-standing member. Earlier today I added the WP Scientology project banner to the article talk page. However, two editors have edit-warred to remove the banner, without offering any explanation and posting aggressive messages in the process (e.g. [1]). I therefore seem to be in the situation, which I admit I've never come across before, of non-members of a WikiProject blocking that WikiProject from including the article in its scope, despite the FAQ at the top of this page. What do WikiProject Council members suggest? Prioryman (talk) 20:14, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

You are free to tag any article that you as a project member believe falls under the scope of your project. If you find others simply dont care to follow a basic guideline I would ask for a Wikipedia:Requests for comment listing it at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines and Wikipedia:Requests for comment/WikiProjects and collaborations......... That said must look at the situation to see if a tag is really worth all the effort and conflict - will the argument to have the tag reflect baldly on the project thus its members? Do what is best for the project overall. Also does the page cover many many topics thus tagging for all related projects will lead to over-tagging? Moxy (talk) 20:51, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
It isn't quite as simple as that, though. What Prioryman neglected to mention is that the Scientology Wikiproject's template is also coupled with a link to a Scientology Arbitration case from several years back. Tagging an article with the project template seems to automatically place the article under the auspices of special Arbitration sanctions. I and other editors object to that sort of classification, especially from Prioryman, who was involved in that very Arbitration case, and once topic-banned from all related articles. If the wikiproject banner was standalone and not connected to automatic sanctions, I don't think there would be any objections to its addition. Tarc (talk) 21:45, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Tarc, are you saying that the parts of this page that deal with Scientology somehow don't come under those sanctions? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
It's not that the WikiProject banner is "connected to automatic sanctions". The banner includes a description of the sanctions, but their implementation isn't dependent on the banner; they are applied to "any Scientology-related articles or discussions on any page". It doesn't actually require the banner to be present for the sanctions to apply. Tarc seems to be under the impression that if he rejects the banner he avoids the sanctions applying. It doesn't work that way - they apply whether or not the banner is present. The banner just indicates that the article is within the scope of WP Scientology, no more, no less. Prioryman (talk) 22:18, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
I already know that the sanctions do not apply to that article, as does anyone with common sense. You cannot take every article that contains the slightest and sparest mention of "Scientology" and declare it to be under the auspices of Arb enforcement. That is way above and beyond what they mean by "broadly construed". But hey, Prioryman is certainly free to try filing an Arb enforcement request against an editor of that article if a situation arises, I gues the matter would be clarified then one way or the other. That will be an interesting discussion to have. Tarc (talk) 22:24, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
"Any Scientology-related articles or discussions on any page" is pretty clear, I think. You can't say "we don't want to be covered by arbitration sanctions" when the ArbCom has explicitly made it clear that the scope of those sanctions is any article or any discussion on any page that concerns this topic area. It's like saying "we don't want to be covered by the speed limit" when there are speed limit signs all the way down the road. But the central point is that the article (1) contains content that is important to WikiProject Scientology, (2) that being so, it's within scope for the WikiProject, and (3) as the FAQ at the top says, "Editors at an article may neither force the group to tag an article nor refuse to permit them to tag an article." If you don't like the fact that articles within this topic area are covered by sanctions, why not petition the ArbCom to lift them? The sanctions are certainly not there because any member of the WikiProject wants them to be there. But you can't refuse to let an article be tagged just because it contains a notice about sanctions in a particular topic area, particularly when those sanctions apply whether or not the article is tagged. Prioryman (talk) 22:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Actually, I believe that "the slightest and sparest mention of <whatever the dispute is over>" is exactly what they mean by "broadly construed". Why don't you ask them? It's my bet that if you said, "Imagine that some IP from a the Scientologist headquarters is editing this article to make their organization sound better. Would this covered under discretionary sanctions or not?" that the answer would be "Yes, definitely."
If not, then the banner could be re-coded with an option to suppress it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:35, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Here's a little thought experiment to highlight how spurious it is to focus on the banner in relation to the sanctions. Suppose I wrote an article that was, in some way, about Scientology. Maybe the whole thing is about Scientology, or half of it, or just a single paragraph. Now suppose that I "forgot" to add the WP Scientology banner to the talk page. Does that mean the sanctions don't apply to it? Of course not; Arbcom's decision was that any content about Scientology anywhere on Wikipedia is covered automatically by the sanctions. That means that List of Wikipedia controversies is covered right now! The only thing the banner does is inform people that an article is covered. If the banner isn't added, it doesn't mean the article isn't covered; it just means people aren't informed that it's covered. Leaving the banner off doesn't make any difference to whether the sanctions apply or not - the only thing the banner does is signify WikiProject Scientology's interest in the article. Prioryman (talk) 23:00, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Agree with WhatamIdoing on this. A good example of content spill over that has caused conflict can be found on the Self-determination page ....that is related to Falkland Islands sovereignty dispute. If there was sanction(s) about the Falkland Islands - both the previous pages would be covered even though Self-determination covers other topics.Moxy (talk) 23:08, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
The Falkland Islands is a good case in point. It's covered by both WP Falkland Islands and WP Argentina. Would anyone think it acceptable for members of WP Falkland Islands to ban members of WP Argentina from adding their project banner to Falkland Islands articles? Prioryman (talk) 23:11, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Agree - no bullies allowed - editors are free to define the scope of the projects they are members of.!!!!Moxy (talk) 23:14, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

See Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Tarc. Please read everyone's statement as there appears to be more going on here than what's been stated in this thread. Thanks. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:33, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Very disappointing to see its come to that :-( .... not sure its a good avenue to resolve a simple tag dispute - but to late. Is this problem being posted about all in any other tlak pages or noticed boards?Moxy (talk) 23:51, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Ah but Prioryman is also a member of wikiproject Gibraltar, in fact not so long ago he was claiming being a founding member of that project. Gibraltar is not only mentioned in the lede of the article but also has a much larger mention in the 2012 section. Yet Prioryman didn't bother to tag the article with wikiproject Gibraltar nor wikiproject Gibraltarpedia, of which he is also a member. Instead after having failed at AFD and DRV he just tags the article with Scientology. I'm all for AGF, but to do that in this instance one would have to had their brain fall out and for it to have been trampled into the savannah by a herd of Wildebeast. This tagging and rush to AE immediately after having failed in other venues was and is a disruption, to which you are all being invited to engage in. John lilburne (talk) 13:45, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Think I understand the concern here that the tag is being placed because it has a sanction attached to it. All need to be aware of two things - sanctions would not apply to a simple tag dispute as all projects can watch over what they like - its a non argument. Secondly regardless if there is a sanction notice or not editors still must be informed (notified) about any sanctions on there talk page long before any action can take place. If someone is doing this in an attempt to game the system that's a different problem the community may want to address.Moxy (talk) 14:21, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Ah but Prioryman is also a member of wikiproject Gibraltar...Yet Prioryman didn't bother to tag the article with wikiproject Gibraltar nor wikiproject Gibraltarpedia, of which he is also a member.
So? Maybe it didn't occur to him at that particular moment. Maybe those groups don't want to support that page. They have the right to support whatever they want, and to not support whatever they don't want. Tagging pages for a WikiProject is the equivalent of you putting something on your watchlist. We don't force individual editors to change the list of articles they're watching to suit us, and we don't force groups of editors to change the list of articles they're tracking, either. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:22, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
I didn't add it for the simple reason that by the time I thought of doing so, Tarc and John lilburne had twice aggressively and without any explanation deleted the WP Scientology banner that I added. I wasn't going to waste my time or get into edit-warring with these people without getting to the bottom of what their problem was. It turns out to be a pretty dumb objection, frankly - they don't like the notification in the banner that "any content about Scientology anywhere on Wikipedia" is covered by arbitration sanctions. They actually seem to think that if the banner doesn't include that message then the sanctions don't apply. Tarc has been pushing for the message to be removed from the banner, but the only effect of that would be that the sanctions would still apply but editors wouldn't be informed of them. What's the point? Prioryman (talk) 07:32, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't think anyone thinks that you're 'a bit slow'. You have over 4 hours to add the Gib projects before you were reverted. 12 hrs before the second revert. You had ample time to add the Gib projects in, projects that you are currently active in, if what you were doing was simply adding projects that might be interested in the article. John lilburne (talk) 18:24, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
So to be clear the tag was reverted because others were not added? This does not sound like any-kind of reason to revert a valid tag placement. Would be best to brush upon our guide on this topic pls see WP:WikiProject coordination.Moxy (talk) 18:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
So to be clear you have accepted Prioryman's invitation to participate in disruption. John lilburne (talk) 20:01, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps your not making your point clear - thus far here your arguing that the tag was reverted because you dont like it there and the fact others were not added. Does this sound like a logical argument to you?Moxy (talk) 20:08, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
"Over 4 hours" and "12 hrs", eh? Have you never heard of people having to go to work or sleep? Prioryman (talk) 20:30, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Not listed in the WikiProject Directory

I have just noticed that WikiProject Disability, an active project established back in June 2010, is not listed in the Directory. I'm not confident of my ability to add it correctly so I would appreciate some help. It should be listed under "General topics" in the "History and society" section. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:35, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I added it at 19:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC), by copying the code for "Wikipedia:WikiProject Animal rights" and pasting it immediately above the code for "Wikipedia:WikiProject Disaster management" and revising the code for the new entry. I assumed that the information in the columns "Active" and "Assessment" and "Peer review" and "Collaboration" and "Portal" and "Notes" were the same. (I hope to add all missing WikiProjects someday, although even after that the list will likely soon be out of date.)
—Wavelength (talk) 19:55, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
New WikiProjects are reported in Wikipedia:Database reports/New WikiProjects.
—Wavelength (talk) 03:33, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

marketing

the impact of billboard advertising on the marketing of gsm product — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.220.68.34 (talk) 16:14, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

Guidelines that aren't guidelines

Someone at WP:VG has just advertised a WP:PROPOSAL RFC for a "guideline" that is actually a mis-tagged WikiProject WP:Advice page, located in the project's namespace. Someone else has written a proposal at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Philosophy that he believes only WP:PHILO members are allowed to have any input into.

I believe that most of the pages these days are correctly categorized or tagged with one of the (fairly ugly) templates:

I just fixed a couple. Do you think it would be worth using a bot to send an educational note to any project that has a page named "WikiProject ___/Guideline" or the like, to let them know about this fairly obscure set of templates? Would it be better to add more information at WP:POLICY? Should we just not worry about it, since most of them are right and individual incidents can be handled as they come up? What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Would be best that all advice pages are marked as such. So yes ... a nicely worded intro to the proper uses of name space and banner would be a good idea.Moxy (talk) 20:43, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Help need creating WikiProjects at Bengali Wikipedia

An editor created a WikiProject page here on English Wikipedia because they couldn't find the resources at the Bengali Wikipedia. They're asking for help. Any ideas? –Mabeenot (talk) 16:12, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Wavelength has suggested a couple of pages, but WikiProjects are uncommon at small wikis. At a small wiki, there is no need for a small group to have separate pages to discuss their interests, because there aren't very many people discussing anything. As for "the resources", he can copy and translate anything on that page to another page at the Bengali Wikipedia, and then he'll have it there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:10, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Archaeoastronomy Problem

This may not be the right place to post this query, but I have recently encountered an incident where a new editor Eon The Sky (talk · contribs · count) has created a WikiProject Archaeoastronomy in a flurry of edits on 5 May. He created a list of over 300 members for this WikiProject in a single edit. Since there was no sign that these editors had agreed to work on this WikiProject, I notified Eon the Sky on his talk page, and deleted the list of members.

Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this incident. Thanks. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 01:25, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

The membership list appears to have been copied from Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomy/Members. isaacl (talk) 01:38, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
This is a sockpuppet of Paul Bedson. One of his hobbyhorses. I've deleted the pages he created and I'm trying to find a script to roll everything back. Dougweller (talk) 09:04, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Hentai

Hi everyone. There's a row brewing at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Anime and manga#RFC about whether the newly-formed WikiProject Hentai should be a part of WikiProject Anime and manga or not. I think this could do with the input of some people experienced in WikiProject-related goings-on, if any of you have a spare moment. Best regards — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 15:19, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

VisualEditor is coming

The WP:VisualEditor is designed to let people edit without needing to learn wikitext syntax. The articles will look (nearly) the same in the new edit "window" as when you read them (aka WYSIWYG), and changes will show up as you type them, very much like writing a document in a modern word processor. The devs currently expect to deploy the VisualEditor as the new site-wide default editing system in early July 2013.

About 2,000 editors have tried out this early test version so far, and feedback overall has been positive. Right now, the VisualEditor is available only to registered users who opt-in, and it's a bit slow and limited in features. You can do all the basic things like writing or changing sentences, creating or changing section headings, and editing simple bulleted lists. It currently can't either add or remove templates (like fact tags), ref tags, images, categories, or tables (and it will not be turned on for new users until common reference styles and citation templates are supported). These more complex features are being worked on, and the code will be updated as things are worked out. Also, right now you can only use it for articles and user pages. When it's deployed in July, the old editor will still be available and, in fact, the old edit window will be the only option for talk pages (I believe that WP:Notifications (aka Echo) is ultimately supposed to deal with talk pages).

The developers are asking editors like you to join the alpha testing for the VisualEditor. Please go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing and tick the box at the end of the page, where it says "Enable VisualEditor (only in the main namespace and the User namespace)". Save the preferences, and then try fixing a few typos or copyediting a few articles by using the new "Edit" tab instead of the section [Edit] buttons or the old editing window (which will still be present and still work for you, but which will be renamed "Edit source"). Fix a typo or make some changes, and then click the 'save and review' button (at the top of the page). See what works and what doesn't. We really need people who will try this out on 10 or 15 pages and then leave a note Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback about their experiences, especially if something mission-critical isn't working and doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar.

Also, if any of you are involved in template maintenance or documentation about how to edit pages, the VisualEditor will require some extra attention. The devs want to incorporate things like citation templates directly into the editor, which means that they need to know what information goes in which fields. Obviously, the screenshots and instructions for basic editing will need to be completely updated. The old edit window is not going away, so help pages will likely need to cover both the old and the new.

If you have questions and can't find a better place to ask them, then please feel free to leave a message on my user talk page, and perhaps together we'll be able to figure it out.

I have just spammed this note to the three dozen WikiProjects with the highest number of active watchers. WikiProject members are often highly active people, so they need to know about this. If you're involved in a smaller group, please share this information with your team. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Correction: Talk pages are (probably?) being replaced by mw:Flow, not by Notifications/Echo. This may happen even sooner than the VisualEditor. There doesn't seem to be a page on the English Wikipedia specifically dedicated to this project, and I wasn't able to find a timeline quickly, but that appears to be the general belief. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:46, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

PhilPapers website

An editor has asserted that WP:WikiProject Philosophy has "a consensus" that he should be permitted to post WP:External links to all philosophy-related categories. AFAICT, the alleged "consensus" at that project is just himself; no other WikiProject participants have discussed it there, much less supported it. It might be helpful to have other views (for or against) at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Continuing to add external links to cat pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:24, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Okay, AGAIN, my claim is that we have a consensus that the PhilPapers, InPho, and SEP websites are reliable sources, and that they should be used as guides for organizing categories and category content. "WhatamIdoing" apparently is on a crusade against the {{Philosophy reference resources}} template which provides links between our category and their category of the same subject matter. I had approached the American Philosophical Association to ask them if they had adopted a standard system of organizing subject matter, and they had not. So I approached the editors of these reliable sources. What I resent is A) the fact that the issue is being misrepresented B) This editor is apparently opening discussions in several places with this agenda, C) I had approached the talk page of Wikipedia:Categorization to get clarification on an issue that a now banned sockpuppet editor had brought up, and in response someone apparently changed the policy so as to directly attack this template without achieving any consensus on the issue. D) The issue has been discussed and there is no consensus that this template violates any policy.
Providing reliable reference resources is one of the most important functions Wikipedia has. The fact is that this issue was discussed at WT:Categorization, and there is NO consensus to either remove this template, nor to change the policy as to exclude it. Could someone please officially close that long held discussion as "no consensus" at this point and leave the issue in peace. Thank you.Greg Bard (talk) 04:13, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
I'm still waiting for proof that "we have a consensus" means that there was a discussion at WT:PHILO that involved anyone except you supporting this. "GregBard approves of this" is not the same thing as "multiple editors at a WikiProject agreed to this". Only the latter counts as anything like "consensus". Just give me a link to a discussion at WT:PHILO or its archives in which multiple editors (i.e., "more than one editor") agreed that spamming external links into cat pages was desirable, and then I'll shut up about the apparent flaws in your claim that "we have a consensus". Of course, if you'd quit saying "we have a consensus" and started saying "I personally believe this is an excellent idea", then I'd have no reason to wonder exactly where the proof is that this alleged consensus ever existed. But so long as you're invoking this apparently mythical consensus at WT:PHILO as proof that steady opposition from the community is irrelevant, I'm going to keep trying to find out when that consensus was actually formed and what exactly it covers.
And, yes, I'm trying to bring other people into this dispute. Alerting relevant noticeboards and WikiProjects is normal and officially recommended. Posting requests for help is what you're supposed to do when you're at an impasse. WT:COUNCIL is the best place to find people who support the rights of WikiProjects to provide WP:Advice pages and who understand the limits on those rights. I'll also be posting to the external links pages, since this dispute involves the handling of external links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:04, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Westerns

I just came across Wikipedia:WikiProject Westerns. This project was created in August 2012, after a discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Westerns.

However, as far as I can see the project was stillborn. There is no current discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Westerns, and the only discussion that ever took place there was a brief chat about applying the project's banner.

I assume that the project was created in good faith, tho a reverted post on the talk page disagreed, calling it a "non-productive vanity (wiki)project".

Whatever the reasons, this project has never flown. Shouldn't it be deleted? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:45, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Category:Inactive WikiProjects contains many inactive WikiProjects. Maybe there will be renewed activity in the future.
—Wavelength (talk) 15:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Projects are rarely deleted, but inactive ones can be merged/redirected to a relevant 'parent'. After a few minor dramas, we recommend providing plenty of notice to even the most obviously inactive group, plus informing the target. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Sure, many projects have periods of activity followed by long periods of inactivity. I think that when a project has been used as a vehicle for collaboration, that record should be kept, even if the project is merged.
But in this case I can find no evidence at all that the project has ever been used for any collaborative work. It is just an empty and unused shell, with a large set of project banners.
I don't know whether the best solution is for the project to be deleted, or merged or redirected. My concern is solely that having the project's banner on 11,700 pages is like having a massive advertising campaign for a business which never opened to customers. It wastes the time of editors who go to the advertised venue. Editors interested in this sort of collaboration would be much better served by being directed to a project which is active, or at least to one which has at some point been active.
Signposts to nowhere don't help. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:07, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
On the other hand, "Westerns" are a singly-notable area of coverage - a genre that would be difficult to merge into another project. Where would you suggest it be merged? As far as I'm concerned, the project is young, and its creators just haven't done a great job of marketing it. With such wide banner coverage, the project may attract some enthusiastic Westerns editors. The project is not even a year old, as you noted, so I'm not inclined to give up on it. If it was stale for 5 years, then I'd agree with your assessment. I'm as deletionist as they come (I say that with tongue-in-cheek), but this project doesn't warrant deletion at this point. Cheers, AstroCog (talk) 13:38, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
The overwhelming bulk of the project's scope is films, so it could be merged to WP:FILMS, or made a taskforce of that project.
If a project has been active and gone stale, then that's usually evidence that it's a potentially viable project which may be revived ... but there's no such evidence in this case. MarcusBritish points out below that he did quite a bit of promotion of the project, but that hasn't worked. I have no prob with the idea of leaving the banners in place for longer to see if things change, but surely at some point it's time to say that this idea has never worked? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:23, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I have left a note at WikiProject Westerns, and also at WikiProject Film. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:43, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Would have been polite of you to also notify the creator of the project, i.e. me, about this discussion directly on my talk page, seems somewhat presumptuous of you not think I wasn't worth inviting to the discussion seeing as I've personally tagged, updated, fixed and worked on hundreds of Western articles myself. Anyway, there is no inactivity if inactivity means absolutely nothing is being done in relation to the project, as the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Westerns articles by quality log stands as proof that articles are being tagged regularly, and even updated from lower to higher classes. Please note that I will personally stop working on these articles should it be merged into WP:FILM, call that WP:DIVA if you like, I couldn't careless. That project (Film) is big enough, without merging all the articles tagged as Westerns into it and making them harder to trace. Projects don't need to have dozens of members, or active discussion boards to function. As Astrocog noted, not even a year has passed yet, so I think you're raising this concern far too early also. There are plenty of other lesser projects to pick on, if you wish to shut down some dead projects, Westerns, however, is not dead. Your concern over 11,700 tagged pages is contrived, I feel. Wiki is not about marketing or advertising, but about collaborating and working towards a common goal. A Wikiproject isn't something to be sold, communication isn't vital with other editors interested in Westerns. The project page stands as a point of contact, if required, and a list of "duties" with regards how tagged articles should be treated. Most editors simply pick up on those requirements and perform them without discussion. There may be another 50 "ghost" members of the project for all we know. You claim to find no evidence of collaboration.. the quality log is evidence. Collaboration by association with the subject itself, not with other members, is just as viable in promoting project growth as any other means. WikiProjects aren't deleted, they are tagged as "inactive" but can still function in that state. But as I said, even a one-man band can play a merry tune.
Note to Astrocog: You say the project wasn't well marketed. On the contrary, I left notifications on the WikiProject Council news page, and with the following Wikiprojects: Film, Television, Actors and Filmmakers, Military History, United States History, Italy, United States, Texas, California, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, American Old West, and Indigenous peoples of North America. See my contribs for 21 August 2012 to confirm this. Given that few people bothered to show interest from this many projects, and that Film, Military History and United States are massive projects, I can only note that there was a pathetic initial response to my promotion of the project, and that I am not to blame whatsoever for the dumbfounded lack of enthusiasm for this notable film genre. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 00:23, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Marcus, you found the note on the project page, so that notification seems to have been sufficient.
You say that "the project page stands as a point of contact, if required". However, despite the prodigious efforts you made to notify others of the project, the evidence so far is that it is not required. Making it a task force of WP:FILMS would still allow all the WP1.0 assessment to be preserved and to continue, and a peek at Category:Category-Class Westerns articles suggests that the vast majority of topics within the scope of the Westerns project are also within the scope of WP:FILMS.
I'm not engaged in any sort of general shut-down-projects exercise, so I didn't "pick on" this one. I just stumbled across it's banner, looked at the discussion page, and saw that it had never had any activity at all. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:16, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
I found it 2 days after this discussion started, by chance, and even then you didn't leave the notification without being prompted to a day later, it was cloak and dagger for a while, which concerns me, because without that notification it is unlikely anyone in the project would have been here to comment, and you may have pushed for deletion. Needless to say, it wasn't sufficient enough for my liking, and lacked professional courtesy. Given that it's common practice to advise article creators of AfD or FfD discussions, the same should extend to editors directly who have take the time to create anything, whether it be a page, a portal or a project. Good manners cost nothing. Simple as that, I won't be rebuked for your mistake so take it as constructive criticism for future use.
As I've already noted above, a lack of discussion on the project page does not mean a lack of activity altogether. The primary focus of Wiki is to create, develop and monitor article. There is no hardline rule that there must be a socio-cognitive community in order for this to be achieved. The Westerns project has made ground without discussion or debate, which suggests the opposite of inactivity, perfect activity, as no one has any room for concern or conflict, it's a relatively easy topic to work on solo without needing a ton of discussions needed on the board daily. Whereas topics such as history, lgbt issues, religion, etc require frequent discussions in order to determine the state of mind of fellow editors, thus forming a collaborative goal. Again, I reiterate, there is no need to create a task force under WP:FILMS. They have enough to do, and task forces are usually ineffective.. go check out the activity on Military History's array of task forces, they are all dead, and we're the biggest WikiProject on Wiki. There is no evidence that a task force is a better alternative than a dedicated project. Also, as you point out, the "majority" of tagged articles are films. So if we merged to WP:FILM, what do we do with all the non-films? Especially all the Western TV shows, all the actors/directors and novels/writers. I sure as hell ain't jumping about between projects and task forces looking for items which have been allocated to different media projects to satisfy these minor concerns. It's an inefficient waste of my time and not very good way of handling a genre of this scale.. 12,000 is hardly a small number of articles. In order to move all the films to WP:FILMS you'd have to distribute the articles into smaller projects. That isn't a step forward, it's a step backwards, to where we were before the project was even established. And just to note, WP:FILMS already tagged 99% of the films that I tagged, and WP:TV tagged the TV shows, WP:BIO the actors/directors, etc.. so there's nothing beneficial to be gained by reverting all the work I and others put into identifying these 12,000 articles since last August.
There is simply no logic behind your proposal, in my mind, because there would be more loss than gain.. if no one is interest in a banner-visible Westerns project then why would anyone be more interested in a tucked away Westerns task force? And just who do you suppose is going to volunteer to convert all the project's efforts from a supposedly dead project format to an even deader task force? Your view that the project is not required appears speculative and I dispute your case with resentment at some of the insinuations being made. The project was established via the correct channels, created via the correct methods, was publicised, and has made efforts to make good ground in 8 months. Now, if you have a problem with me following the book, do tell, before throwing a deletionist book at me.. because I get the feeling I'm treading on someone's toes here and it doesn't hold well with me. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 11:52, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Calm down, Marcus. This isn't an XFD discussion, where notifications are critical; it was a first step raising of an issue.
You raise a good point about the idea of a film task force being little better than a standalone project, but I think you miss the advantages of merger to a task force:
  1. It means one less banner on each talk page, which is less clutter
  2. If an editor goes to a task force talk page, and finds it to be dormant, they can easily go up a level to the parent project. OTOH, a dormant standlone project is a dead-end.
In the end, it seems that the only purpose being served by WP:Westerns is as a WP1.0 assessment tool. I'm not entirely sure that this is such a great thing of itself (it's a great idea in theory, and lots of projects use this facility, but I see decreasing sign of the assessments being maintained or used). However I'm happy to accept that the assessment process is at least potentially a Good Thing™ ... but sincde that's all there is here, why do we need a whole WikiProject? Why can't we just an assessment system for a particular set of topics without having to pretend that there is a huge collaborative exercise around it? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:30, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Firstly, I dispute the "banner clutter" argument. Your average Western article will have just 2 banners, some 3, more important ones such as major celebs such as John Wayne and Audie Murphy, will have possibly 4 or 5. There are many articles on Wiki with far more than that even. I consider it a moot point based on a false premise, as "banner clutter" isn't really that much of an issue on a Wiki-wide scope, and is your think it is, you're aiming to nullify the wrong project.. 12,000 from millions of articles won't solve a thing.. a drop in the ocean isn't worth the effort. Your average Western article isn't going to be controversial enough to receive such a massive debate that one extra banner will ever get in the way. A drip in a drop in the ocean. Negligible issues like that don't affect the "big picture" as far as Wiki-entire is concerned. But if you really think removing all those {{Westerns}} = 10bytes (as bare tag) x 12,000 = 117Kb is worth the trouble, please do find someone who agrees creating 12,000 new talk page histories through the removal process is better value than a WikiProject.
Your second point is also largely wrong. As I stated before, the majority of Western banners are accompanied by other banners.. such as Film, TV, Books, Bio, U.S. and/or U.S. States. If an editor feels the need to start a discussion with a project and considers Westerns "dead" there will be other project banners to fall back on. And even if there isn't, the Westerns project page links to three other wikiprojects in the related projects section. But you are also acting as though anyone wanting to start a discussion on the Westerns discussion page isn't going to get a response. There is no evidence to support that either, because clearly Astrocog and I have the page watched to have responded to this malarkey. Anyone needing to use the talk page who is competent can do so, and can expect a response, because there no ongoing daily discussions is not an automatic sign of inactivity.
All your comments regarding the project, it's assessment, it's banner tagging, seem to be directed solely at this one project, without following the WikiProject Council's terms:
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Inactive projects states "To qualify as 'inactive', a project page should have had no directly project-related activity for at least three months." All the banner tagging in the last few months is likely to qualify for something.
  • Category:Semi-active WikiProjects states "these projects are believed to see only a minimal level of activity". However, even if Westerns can only be considered semi-active that does not grant any editor the right to remove the project banners, because the Council grants the right to reactivate inactive projects but not the right to erase their work. Especially as all your claims are based in a very short-term time-frame. As someone previously stated, is a project has been defunctional for several years then there's a strong case to clear out the clutter. But 8 months, that makes you pretty impatient, and I'm sure there's more important things an admin can be doing to optimise Wikipedia than worrying about a project that does have a small number of dedicated contributors.
Finally, no one is "pretending" anything.. they never were, they never have been. A WikiProject doesn't have to be packed with conversation and activity to indicate that behind the scenes people are working on the one and only thing that matters, the entire purpose of Wikipedia - the articles themselves. I don't know why you feel Wiki has to host its projects as some sort of social function for lively members and regular chit-chat. You're putting far too much personal emphasis on what you think a WikiProject is, and what is should be doing. I think that's wrong, and you need to look as what a WikiProject achieves not what it is per se. A WikiProject isn't a meeting hall, it's a notice board full of jobs and backlogs.. just because other projects are highly conversation doesn't make them the model for every project to follow. I think you need to step back and decide what it is you're trying to achieve or prove, and whether it is worth your time, my time, or anyone else's time discussing further. Well, I'm done ranting... WP:Filibuster ahoy! Ma®©usBritish{chat} 17:29, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Marcus, a WikiProject is—by definition—a group of people. Can you name some of the other people in this group? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:22, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
That is a very short-sighted and out-of-context definition, followed by a leading question. Go read the link you gave again, it defines more what a WikiProject DOES to improve Wikipedia, not what it is or can be interpreted as. I won't be baited with word manipulation. If you want a list of names, go check the project member list instead of posing daft questions which don't help matters. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 19:06, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
"The discussion pages attached to a project page are a convenient forum for those involved in that project to talk about what they are doing, to ask questions, and to receive advice from other people interested in the group's work." Note the word "convenient", not obligatory nor a project requirement. Nor an absolute indication of activity. If no questions are being asked, no advice being requested, chances are no one is stuck. How do you get stuck writing about a Western? Seriously, there's a certain level of bad faith in this discussion, imo, because prickly POVs are being presented here and the lack of optimism is disgusting. Ma®©usBritish{chat} 19:16, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't know why you think I'm opposed to this WikiProject. From the definition: "A WikiProject is a group of editors that want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia." What is a WikiProject? A group of people. What does that group do? Work together. If you've got an actual group of people that are actually working together, then that's a valid WikiProject, and we're done here.
(I can, of course, easily see why someone would suspect from the page histories that this isn't a group, but having multiple people editing the main page or the main talk page isn't a requirement.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
I signed up as a member of the group earlier this year, and I have done some assessments and tagging. An article that I wrote is the project's example FA article. While the number of members of the project is small, that doesn't mean the project is doomed to fizzle. Projects will often do editing drives or work towards meeting the goals of a to-do list. I don't see why that can't happen here, especially since the project is young. I agree with Marcus that "banner clutter" is a non-issue, especially for the articles attached to this project. If you want to see banner clutter, go look at a celebrity, who has a project banner from every city they may have lived in. Picking on this project, when I'm willing to bet there are many, if not dozens, of projects out there with higher levels of inactivity. Cheers, AstroCog (talk) 19:58, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I've only been on Wikipedia two weeks (active weeks), and am visiting here for the first time - meaning I have no axe to grind. Nor have I a particular interest in westerns. But I do remember reading a rule that says something like "the spirit of the rule trumps the rule itself", and I like that a lot. I just joined a project that looks like it may have had scant attention for a while; I'm sure there are others. But having that project exist, already constructed, is a way (even an invitation) for me as a newcomer to get involved. I figure activity is bound to be sporadic sometimes in a volunteer-only environment, but having placeholders and points of contact that remain over time is still useful, binding together activities of people who aren't even actively engaged at the same time. In short, while projects were designed for groups, a "group" can still be "one at a time", and useful to the one. And if a currently-one-person project is not overloading the ordinary wiki mechanisms that support projects, I see no reason to question its existence or placement. Marcus doesn't want "Westerns" to reside under "Films". Fine, the group of one has spoken; it's the project's choice to make. I am also rather mystified why he hasn't had more overt joiners - seems a wide enough topic and specialty to generate some. But I also agree that "activity" has many ways of being represented, and project pages are just one of those. I also agree with the suggestion above that maybe five years is a reasonable time scale for taking a look at what "time has told"; but take a close look. Evenssteven (talk) 22:51, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Adding categories to articles to collect metrics

Elsewhere on this board I asked about the guidelines for applying WikiProject categories to Wikipedia articles for the purpose of collecting metrics about them. The precedent which I had seen was that WikiProjects tag article talk pages, and the tag comes with a category. Bots can look at all articles in a category and generate metrics. The category is what is important, not the WikiProject tag, but I was not aware of any WikiProject or project of any kind which applied hidden categories to articles for the purpose of generating metrics.

I found one. See Category talk:World Digital Library related. The project at Wikipedia:GLAM/World Digital Library - a page in Category:WikiProject World Digital Library - encourages users to add content from this organization to Wikipedia articles then apply their metrics tracking category to the article. The category is a hidden category. I posted some questions about usage for that category on its talk page. Does anyone know of any guidelines or precedent for such things? It seems great to me and I would like to replicate the model for health organizations which want to track Wikipedia article development and traffic. Bring discussion to Category talk:World Digital Library related. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:19, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject discussion for research

FYI, there's a lively discussion going on at Xiangju's talk page regarding the purpose, efficiency, communication, and outreach of WikiProjects. It's part of some research Xiangju is trying to conduct. Check it out. –Mabeenot (talk) 16:06, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

More Female Hip Hop Artists Should be Mentioned Through-Out the "Hip Hop" Article & "Hip Hop Music" Article

Hey all,

Female Name Dropping: I started this thread for the "Hip Hop" Talk Page, referencing names per decade. You can drop more names (and any info you know about them) in the talk thread I started. References to the musicians would be VERY helpful as well, but dropping names is good too - someone can always glean through the list and find links to some of these for addition to the articles later. Many of these artists have their own Wikipedia Page.

Adding Female Names Through-Out the Articles: You can also work on incorporating some of these names into the articles if you can provide resources/links for them & explain their relevance. There have been female hip hop artists from the 80s to today, but there is not adequate representation of these female hip hop artists and their relevance to both the music and their cultural relevance for each decade/subcategory. So please add more of these females. And start dropping more names on the talk page! Both mainstream and alternative, historically and today. See this talk page: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Hip_hop#toc, #27, #29, & #30

Thanks! http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Hip_hop#toc Sylvia Blossom (talk) 20:16, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Alphabetizing categories on article pages

Comments are welcome at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories#re alphabetizing categories on the article pages (version of 06:54, 8 June 2013).
—Wavelength (talk) 16:00, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

OK Go

OK Go is one of the finest rock bands and it is a shame that since a while it had a crappy article and still do. I propose this article becomes primarily watched as it is repeatedly glutted with a lot of info (sourced) they say and the whole band is branded as a pop musical cultural revolutional fenomenon. If you wanna get the idea better come to the history page. I propose this article become watched semi-protected or locked to prevent further vandalism and revert wars! Regards: The Mad Hatter (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:33, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Although irrelevant to the WikiProject Council, I would point you to WP:RFPP to request protection there. Sir Rcsprinter, Bt (orate) @ 19:47, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Social Art

Social Artist in the 21st Century Current Artists: — Preceding unsigned comment added by Socialart1 (talk • contribs) 01:42, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject advice

I have been running WP:FOUR for about 4 years. I have suddenly encountered some conflict running the project. Does the WikiProject Council have any avenues through which to seek resolution.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/WP:FOUR/WP:CHICAGO/WP:WAWARD) 22:20, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Posting here is the main forum for seeking help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
I have a very lengthy explanation that basically boils down to I have been running a project for over 4 years that basically only has two regulars involved in running it, making it a small project that keeps a list and grants an award. Any day any herd of people passing by can question the authority of the people running the project and by what they call WP:CONSENSUS reinterpret the award to make themselves more eligible for it and demand that their reinterpretation be enforced. That day has come at this project. Is this the place to for that type of issue? Should I present my lengthy details here?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/WP:FOUR/WP:CHICAGO/WP:WAWARD) 23:29, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
Well, is WP:FOUR actually a WikiProject? It doesn't seem to have any of the typical features of one (e.g. a concept of membership, a topical or maintenance-based pool of articles, etc.), and I'm not sure that this is the best forum for discussing Wikipedia-space processes in general; perhaps something like RFC/CENT or the Village Pump might be more suitable in this particular case. Kirill [talk] 00:03, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
When a Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals passes like this did, doesn't that make it a WikiProject. It also has a pool of articles, (i.e., those WP:FA that have been led through each of the four stages of development by the same editor(s)).--TonyTheTiger (T/C/WP:FOUR/WP:CHICAGO/WP:WAWARD) 01:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
P.S. note that this is one of the few places on wikipedia were a nominator is instructed to close his own nomination as approved if successful. Nothing fishy went on with this project's proposal.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/WP:FOUR/WP:CHICAGO/WP:WAWARD) 01:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
The proposal mechanism isn't really a formal one; having gone through the process doesn't necessarily make something an "official" WikiProject, in my opinion, any more so than not having gone through it would transform a WikiProject into something else.
In purely practical terms, though, I don't think we're in a good position to offer advice regarding WP:FOUR simply because it's so fundamentally different in structure from a typical WikiProject. If I had to draw a parallel, I would say that it's set up somewhat like the FA process; and while that does share some characteristics with normal WikiProjects—as does WP:FOUR—I don't think that necessarily makes us the right people to review it. Kirill [talk] 01:23, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Templates

Hello. I'm trying to create an importance and quality scale for the WikiProject NCIS template but am having trouble getting the rating to show up on the talk pages. Can someone please tell me what needs to be done for this to work correctly? --1ST7 (talk) 19:22, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi there. I've edited the template for you - it should all be working now. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:25, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Hi,

Pls how do i get on diz group — Preceding unsigned comment added by Engr Dickdan (talk • contribs) 08:17, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Benjamin Wade

Greetings: The entry for Bejamin Wade is too brief and needs to be expanded. I propose to do this by making the outline and total length similar to the current entry for Thaddeus Stevens. Any suggestions would be appreciated. 98.92.153.86 (talk) 17:03, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

When there are numerous projects interested in an article, are there any conventions governing the order in which these are presented? Cynwolfe (talk) 19:41, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm. That is a good question. I don't believe there is, but I would guess that common sense would dictate the most relevant project would go on top and the lesser projects towards the bottom. Thoughts?--Mark 19:45, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
I was thinking along those lines, with relevance determined by importance ratings. If multiple projects considered the article of the same importance, I suppose alphabetical order could be used within that rating. I ask because of the burgeoning number of banners plastered at Talk:Roman Empire. I'm not sure how many of these projects are active in improving and maintaining the article, and willing to act as a resource should questions arise. Most, however, rate the article as of "high" importance. Ideally, I would see the banner shell as offering the option of subdivisions that read "This article is of top importance to the following WikiProjects" with subsequent bars for high/mid/low/unassessed. But maybe there aren't that many articles with such an array of banners to sort. Cynwolfe (talk) 21:39, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
[A previous discussion of this question is archived at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 20#Ordering of wikiprojects (April 2013).
—Wavelength (talk) 21:44, 24 August 2013 (UTC)]
I think your suggestion sounds reasonable. I would also think that inactive projects could go at the bottom or deleted completely.--Mark 21:46, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
@Mark, what is your definition of an "inactive project"? Is it one where there no discussion on the talk page? Is it one that has stopped assessing articles? Is it one that does not get enough daily views(how many)? Anything else? Just wondering. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:11, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
I think it is a matter of perception and trust Ottawahitech. We are not discussing a deletion of a project itself, just lowering its template or deleting it from the talk page. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make such a determination for even articles with a large amount of projects. One way to make such a quick determination is to look at the number of articles the template image is linked to. How many articles of the same rating and importance does the project have? How many members. How long has the current collaboration been up on the main project page. Are there task force sub groups? Are they active? There are a lot of ways to quickly determine if a project has become inactive enough to merely drop the template below another project that has all of these things and have a larger group of currently collaborating editors. Some projects may look inactive but have actually picked up activity albeit slow and almost imperceptible, so perhaps it may be better to leave a note on the project talk page before deleting a template to wait for some reaction, if any.--Mark Miller (talk) 16:43, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
Those are good metrics, but I'm wondering whether they're objective enough to be used for something like this. If each editors is going to individually evaluate a project's activity before removing its tag, then I suspect we're going to wind up with a lot of projects getting removed from some articles but not from others, which would make those projects' assessment statistics pretty useless. Personally, I don't see that as a positive outcome; if a project is so inactive that its tags should be removed, then I think that decision needs to be made centrally and applied across the board.
None of that applies to changing the order of the projects in the template, of course; I don't really see any problems with using the metrics you've suggested for that, although I'm not sure that the position of a project tag in the banner shell really makes a difference to begin with. Kirill [talk] 17:02, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
IMHO, when there's a long list of projects, alphabetical order is often a good plan. The lists at American black bear and Appalachia combine alphabetical order with a topical logic: the top category in each shell is the main topic for the article, while the rest of the list is a mostly-alphabetical list of named geographic places related to the topic. In contrast, banner shells like this one and this one may have some logic based on someone's theory of which projects are most relevant, but the lists are hard to scan -- they seem chaotic. --Orlady (talk) 17:27, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
All useful perspectives. I've really only encountered this as a problem at Talk:Roman Empire, which last time I looked was alphabetical and led off with Albania. If someone were looking for a project to answer a question about the article, or a project to join because they were interested in the contributing within the topic area, that order doesn't seem the most helpful. Albania has territory within the former Roman Empire, but appears nowhere in the article other than the list of modern countries that lie within that territory. I'm not picking on Albania; there are something like 40 modern countries for which this is true, and with other (more) relevant projects, the article has the potential to harbor as many as 50 project banners. That would make it hard to locate the most relevant projects, which would probably be Classical Greece & Rome, Rome, Former Countries, Military History, and Italy. I don't think I ever see anyone do serious editing or participate on the talk page except G&R types, who are usually quick to answer questions, and who have an active project. BTW, this is fer sure not the most important issue in the world, but there was a little flurry recently when some of the project banners for modern countries were added. So I suppose the underlying issue is profligate bannering of articles when the project isn't really likely to become involved with developing or acting as a resource for the article. This results when enthusiastic editors start regarding project- bannering as a kind of categorizing ("oh, the Romans had horses, so let's put the Equine project banner on there"). Cynwolfe (talk) 19:54, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
My thought on that one is that the first Wikiprojects named should be the ones for which this is a central article, namely (1) WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome and (2) WikiProject Rome. Put the others in alphabetical order. --Orlady (talk) 21:08, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikiproject Traditional Medicine

Wikiproject traditional medicine hopes to increase the coverage on traditional medicine topics, by culture, organisms used and by disease. The article for Aztec medicine is about 3 paragraphs right now; the only traditional medicine articles of any real note currently are traditional chinese medicine and ayuvedric medicine. This project would be mostly for anthropological reasons, which is what differentiates it from alternative medicine. When exactly will Septembers wiki project proposals be shown? — Preceding unsigned comment added by CensoredScribe (talk • contribs) 14:54, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

The first person to make a proposal in September can add the section heading. Remember that a WikiProject is fundamentally a group of people. The #1 task for starting a WikiProject is to assemble a sizable group of people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:13, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
The Traditional Medicine person may want to join the Mind-Body project for which we've been gathering people for nearly a year. I did not think this was the place to propose projects - there is another page for that. CJ (talk) 16:04, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

what happened to Not Dead Yet  ?

Why has not dead yet been removed and apparently nearly every reference to it ? Is Wikipedia ableist?

Ndy should at least be referenced in article on assisted suicide , as a US disability rights org. Etc. Disabed and proud (talk) 14:48, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Come over to WP:WikiProject Disability, we're a bunch of editors with an interest in disability topics. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:53, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

I've tried and as I'm on my mobile system I can't seem to find a way to join. Since I wrote the original article on ableism I do think it would be appropriate. Even if I do join the project, however it would not obviate the original question. What happened to Not Dead Yet? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Disabed and proud (talk • contribs) 15:23, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

You don't need to "join" formally. You can participate directly by answering questions on the project's talk page or working with the group on articles that interest everyone there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 25 August 2013 (UTC)
It was speedy deleted under criterion A7 - "No explanation of significance".
I have posted a request to the deleting admin to undelete and userify it to my Sandbox, I will let you know when the content is available - perhaps we can collaborate on rewriting it to an acceptable standard. Notability is not a problem as there is sufficient mainstream press coverage of the org's position, activities and statements. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:38, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
@Disabed and proud, I see the deleted article has been placed in User:Dodger67/Sandbox/Not_Dead_Yet. Why would such an article be deleted as a "A7 - No explanation of significance" is anyone's guess. XOttawahitech (talk) 00:42, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
Sorry I've not done much about this yet - I'm rather busy off-wiki. I have posted a few sources on the Talk page. Intertested editors are welcome to start working in the sandbox - I'm looking at Disabed and proud, you've not responded to my earlier invitation yet. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:14, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Should WikiProjects be rated on their level of activity?

It is not good to lead people into projects that are inactive. It is also not good to remove semi-active WikiProjects from talkpages and hasten their demise. Can we come up with some metrics to help guide editors to a project of their choice? XOttawahitech (talk) 20:34, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Some metrics are at Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProjects by changes.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:48, 30 August 2013 (UTC)
I think that the best thing to do is to tag the WikiProject, with a link to WP:REVIVE.
I believe that inactive projects can also have their banners marked as such. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:45, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:, just wondering who decides whether a project is Active, Semi-Active, Inactive or Defunct? SeeCategory:WikiProjects by status. XOttawahitech (talk) 04:11, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
You do. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:49, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
@Wavelength:, just wondering if the numbers provided by Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProjects by changes are indicative of the activity of the WikiProject since I am sure many of the edits are performed by editors who are blissfully unaware of the projects that pages are part of. XOttawahitech (talk) 04:13, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
I checked here about three minutes ago, and it appears that they are not indicative of the activity of the articles in their purviews. I tried to help by linking to that report, but maybe it was not so helpful after all.
—Wavelength (talk) 04:28, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
That's actually a useful link, because it tells you whether anyone is actually trying to "work together as a team" (the whole point of a WikiProject). The changes counted are things like comments on the project's talk page or updates to lists of articles that the group is working on. Zero changes means zero people trying to communicate with the other members. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:49, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
I recently noticed a project which had some kind of 'collaboration project of the month' template, which I thought was a very good idea for helping to revive interest in projects. I've tried to find it again but am going round in circles. If anyone knows what I am talking about, I'd appreciate some help in finding it again. Thanks Tento2 (talk) 13:16, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
See these search results and these search results.
—Wavelength (talk) 15:37, 18 September 2013 (UTC)
Very helpful, thank you for responding. And now I remember it was on the Wikiproject:Medicine that I saw the template! Tento2 (talk) 15:41, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Fries

As a Belgian, I can't allow the example of Germans in WWII in France about the fries, because as everybody knows: fries were invented by Belgians. Why Englishmen called it "French" fries still remains a mystery to me... I dindn't removed it myself because people might think I'm a troll when I delete France and write Belgium...strange, but true... || Have a good day Bellepheron (talk) 15:51, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Some help getting on directory?

I'm not sure where to turn. I've tried numerous things in order to get our project Mind-Body listed under Multidisciplinary. I think I've crossed listed it under Health and Fitness and Medicine, but I'm new to this so I'm not sure I did it correctly. Any help would be appreciated. We proposed the project a long time ago, and now have a group of people who want to join, but I need it listed to make it easier for them to find it. CJ (talk) 16:12, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

I just fixed the links to Mind-Body in the directory, though I doubt that will attract any attention in way of new members. Few, if any people actually search the directory for projects to work on. Also, please start new discussions on the bottom of a talk page. --Scott Alter (talk) 02:01, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Bannering and excessive bannering

See this discussion where the subject of excessive tagging has come up. -- 70.24.244.158 (talk) 12:32, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

This is an effort to delete the {{WikiProject United States}} banner. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
Which is something that could radically change what projects on Wikipedia is about and needs watching very carefully, specially anyone interested in the integrity of project space, regardless of the inactivity or lack of upkeep.

As to whether the issue actually is anything to do with excessive bannering is another matter, which is in effect misrepresenting the issue sats 13:39, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

How to create and structure a Joint Task Force

There is a proposal to create a joint Task Foce between WikiProject Disability and WikiProject Medicine, I would like to get some guidance here on how such a Task Force is structured so that it can be created if the proposal is accepted by both projects. The guideline page on Task Forces is totally silent on shared TFs. The first question that comes to mind - does the TF page exist under one of the projects with redirects from the other one or is it created in a separate space? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:54, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Using a redirect is the simplest approach. I suggest putting it in the WPMED pages, because they've already got a bunch of (low-activity) task forces. See WP:MEDTF for instructions on setting it up. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Containers

Could benefit from some more eyes on it. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:29, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

One of the structural problems that we have is that anyone can create a WikiProject, or at least create some pages and a banner. A couple of years ago, I started looking at new WikiProjects in an effort to figure out what was likely to result in a successful project. I defined "successful" very loosely, like "some kind of reply to a message on the group's talk page three months after page creation". I never got very far, but the number of people formally pledging to participate before creation (at the /Proposals page) and the experience level of the proposer/creator seemed to be very promising.

My thought was that if we could add to the /Proposals page an informational statement like "Research shows that WikiProjects are almost never successful unless the person proposing it has already been editing for at least six months" or "Research shows that WikiProjects are almost never successful unless at least eight people pledge to support it", with instructions to then join a larger group first, then we might get both fewer proposals and fewer dead projects.

If someone would like to take over that work (actually, if you did it on a large scale, I think it would be publishable), then I'd be happy to figure out where I left my notes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

You may or may not be aware of Wikipedia:Database reports/New WikiProjects.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Template:Infobox task force

Template:Infobox task force has been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.181.39 (talk) 05:12, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Request for Comment on Proposal to Merge Wikiprojects

One alternative was rejected, per SNOW. The rest is inconclusive, although the discussion may help to focus further deliberation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by David in DC (talk • contribs) 15:07, 19 October 2013‎

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

There is a discussion on the talk page of the WikiProject Council about a proposal to merge a number of WikiProjects. It touches on the governance of WikiProjects in general. The discussion would benefit from much wider participation. The specific proposal, entitled "Merging projects - Fringe", and initial reactions to it, can be found here. An alternate proposal, entitled "Merging projects - Compromise", and reactions to it, can be found here.

Please read both threads carefully. Please comment, under the appropriate subheading of this RfC, on any or all of these three questions.
Do you support or oppose the initial proposal?
Do you support or oppose the alternate proposal?
If you do not support either proposal, should a second RfC be initiated to solicit alterative proposals for a merger of some or all of the projects listed in the initial merger proposal?

Both the role of WikiProjects in general and the specific topic of WP:FRINGE can engender passionate debate. If you choose to participate in this RfC, please try to do so in a manner that sheds more light than it generates heat. Scoring debating points at the risk of damaging the mutual trust necessary for successful collaborative editing is bad. We are not playing a zero-sum game. We are trying to build up a project that some random dude once described this way: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." David in DC (talk) 03:55, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

It adds confusion to re-post these proposals. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:36, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Do you support or oppose this initial proposal?

Merging projects - Fringe

There are a number of inactive or mostly inactive wikiprojects with overlapping areas, which are all related to fringe views. Since the projects are mostly inactive, messages only get responded to infrequently, and most of the projects are in disarray. My proposal is that they all be merged into one wikiproject with different task forces so that we can try and kick some life into a Wikiproject in this area.

Projects:

One way of doing this could be to create, say, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fringe and have 5 or 6 task forces (based on merging in the wikiprojects), such as:

  • Cryptozoology
  • Skepticism
  • Alt Med
  • Astrology
  • Creationism
  • Paranormal (Occult and Parapsychology here as well)

Thoughts?

  • Support as proposer. I often see the same faces editing in these article areas, so there is a lot of overlap (projects Homeopathy, Pseudoscience, NLP can be ignored because they are already merged). What is common about this topic area is that it concerns topics which have a minor following in their respective fields or are a niche/non-mainstream, except for skepticism which is about the critical examination of claims (which nicely overlaps in topic area). Now I'm not saying everyone does overlap, but there is a significant fraction who do, and a unified project with task forces lets people get on with the specifics of a niche, but have a more readily apparent pool of editors to turn to in the greater project area. Some parts of Alt Med don't belong (that which concerns herbalism mostly) but I suggest taking some of its scope, particularly the obvious pseudoscience, quackery and the questionable science. I'm also flexible on the name. IRWolfie- (talk) 09:16, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Lumping all of them together into one will just make people leave, as many other editors mentioned in the above discussion. Jackmcbarn (talk) 14:23, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I agree with Jackmcbarn. I prefer the alternative proposal and don't think the merger/task force idea would attract new editors or groups of people naturally inclined to work together.Dynamicimanyd (talk) 15:03, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I agree that it merges projects of diverse interests, and am concerned that it could confuse the purpose of the fringe policy, by leaving the impression that it is limited to certain subjects rather than being applicable to all pages (e.g., within astrology, the view that it developed techniques as a result of historical transmission across various cultures is "mainstream"; the view that it was taught fully-formed to ancient cultures by visiting aliens is "fringe").Tento2 (talk) 17:08, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. A lot of these are unrelated, the alternative proposal is much more logical. Joolzzt (talk) 23:56, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Basically a sum of the reasons everybody gives. --Walkiria Nubes (talk) 00:38, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Merging the Skepticism project with any of the others will not be a good fit due to opposing points of view.Frederick Green (talk) 21:55, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose. I already made a case for it in the previous section. And on a quick note, NO, occultism is not covered by paranormal activities. In any case, is the other way around.Legion fi (talk) 08:11, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Do you support or oppose this alternate proposal?

Merging projects - Compromise

Rather than trying to cram all these into one project, perhaps the field just needs a little reorganization (let's call it community planning since WikiProjects are supposed to be groups of editors working together). From the discussion and the list of project scopes assembled above, it is clear that:

  • WP Cryptozoology and WP Parapsychology are included within the scope of WP Paranormal, so a merger would be natural and the resources on the current Cryptozoology and Parapsychology project pages could be preserved by turning them into task forces of WP Paranormal. They would all share one banner and a consolidated membership list. Consolidating talk pages is also an option.
  • WP Homeopathy and WP NLP appear to be too narrow in scope to support a project at this point in time, so a merger with WP Alternative medicine would make sense. Again, the existing project resources could be recycled as task forces.
  • WP Skepticism is the result of a merger that was conducted relatively well and appears to be the most active of the projects involved in this discussion. Their page has a very clear scope and goals, which ought to be a model for other projects that are consolidated.
  • I agree with David Gerard and others that WP Creationism is in an odd place halfway between WP Christianity and WP Alternative Views, so it may make sense to turn it into a joint task force shared by those two projects (assuming that WP Christianity will accept it).
  • Astrology and the occult are at the intersection of a variety of other fields including projects covering religion, history, mythology, astronomical objects, and secret societies. However, they are very prominent topics that ought to remain as projects, albeit with a significant overhaul. Closer connections to other projects will be required to revive and sustain the astrology and occult projects.
  • I'd suggest that either WP Alternative Views or WP Skepticism should serve as the "umbrella project" for all the remaining projects involved in this discussion. An umbrella project helps organize the other projects and serves as a place where people can turn when they don't get an answer from a more specific project. WP Alternative Views has the broadest scope, but WP Skepticism appears to be the most active. (Note: The umbrella project serves as a parent project. It does not merge with the remaining WikiProjects.)
  • Nothing should be called "fringe" as that term seems to include a certain stigma.

The ultimate goal of all these rearrangements is to make the projects in this field easier to navigate for new contributors, build stronger connections between the projects, consolidate banners for easier assessment, and ensure that editors have somewhere else to turn if they don't get a reply when they post on one project's page. What do you think?

  • Support since it was clarified that the left over projects don't merge into the umbrella project, but instead remain under it, (possibly not exclusively, but at least for most). For WP Alt medicine, WP Paranormal, WP Christianity/WP Religion to accept merging related wikiprojects. Move the corresponding wikiproject pages to the taskforces. - Sidelight12 Talk 21:34, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Support with the only caveat being that I'm not certain WP Creationism is half way between Christianity and Alternative Views, surely it's half way between WP Religion and Alternative Views? Samwalton9 (talk) 18:40, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Prefer that WP Alternative Views becomes the umbrella for Alternative medicine, Astrology, Cryptozoology, Occult and the new WP Paranormal etc, although happy for Pseudoscience to be merged into Skepticism. Joolzzt (talk) 23:52, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. This proposal leaves the Skepticism project intact and thus gains my support. Placing the others under a common umbrella project (or two) seems to make good sense.Frederick Green (talk) 21:59, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Support - Alternate views seems to be the best, most neutral, name for the broad grouping, which would also, presumably, potentially include conspiracy theories and other matters of popular culture relating to history and/or science which have comparatively little backing in the relevant academic communities as well. As "astrology" and some other fields fall within the broad category of "Occult," I could, I guess, see a merger there as well, if such would be amenable to both projects. John Carter (talk) 15:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Support. I like this a lot more. I agree that calling stuff "fringe" can be a bit off-putting to people and possibly drive them away, and creationists and occultists are unlikely to peacefully work together. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 00:26, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I do find this to be a better proposal. But again. Why keep WP Occult out? It is not covered in WP Paranormal, not in the almost insulting WP Alternate Views. A case may be made about it being close to Paranormal. But then again, what does paranormal has to do with the chronology of publication of the Liber Juratus? Or with the differences introduced ideologically by Samuel Liddell Mathers in his translation of the Lemegeton as contrasted with the cannonical translation of Peterson? What does Fringe Theories, or "Alternate Views", have to do with the etimology of the name Lucifuge Rofocale, a demon mentioned in the Grand Grimoire, which comes from an anagram of the name of another demon and the latin words for "he who flees from light"?. They have NOTHING to do with. And I could go on citing discrepancies. But instead I would like to ask that, if this goes trough, you leave WP Occult out of it. Thanks Legion fi (talk) 08:24, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

If you do not support either proposal, should a second RfC be initiated to solicit other proposals for a merger of some or all of the projects listed in the initial merger proposal?

  •  Comment: support the second proposal with exceptions. 1) The leftover wikiprojects don't merge into an umbrella project. 2) The active parent wikiprojects accept the mergers. - Sidelight12 Talk 05:42, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
    To clarify, the remaining projects would not be merged into an umbrella project. An umbrella project would serve as the parent project and keep an eye on all these other projects, similar to how the umbrella project WikiProject Science serves as a parent for a variety of projects covering specific scientific fields. –Mabeenot (talk) 15:19, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
    What are the names of the people that will (allegedly) oversee these? If you do not have a group, then there is absolutely not a WikiProject there. If you have less than half a dozen named, committed editors, then this "umbrella project" is very likely to just be another dead project that has to be merged away later. Seriously: if you do not have a sizable group, then you should not create a formal WikiProject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment - I am myself not as sure as some Creationism would necessarily be merged with WikiProject Christianity rather than WikiProject Religion, as there are some creationist schools in other faiths as well. Otherwise, no objections. John Carter (talk) 14:53, 19 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Commment I don't think any specific merger can be done unless people identify which projects they belong to as we don't know which projects agree. I'm confused why this is an RfC considering this is a matter of the wikiprojects organising themselves and not something those outside the projects should decide. IRWolfie- (talk) 08:19, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
I, too, am confused. The initial proposal, posted not to any of the WikiProject pages, but rather to the WikiProject Council talk page, says "My proposal is that they all be merged into one wikiproject with different task forces so that we can try and kick some life into a Wikiproject in this area." I'm finding it difficult to reconcile that statement with "this is a matter of the wikiprojects organising themselves and not something those outside the projects should decide." Can you help? David in DC (talk) 22:10, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
I think IRWolfie more or less addressed that above, where he said or implied (I forget which) that given the number of groups involved, having one central location for the discussion of the generally dormant groups would be a good idea, and that maybe the most neutral approach would be to choose a venue for discussion other than the talk page of any individual related project, because that might be seen as showing some degree of favoritism to that project. John Carter (talk) 17:28, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
"I'm using it as a location for a centralised discussion between any people left in any of the wikiprojects." I never expected non-members to contribute, IRWolfie- (talk) 07:32, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment While I do support the second proposal, that sounds like a valid point, IRWolfie, and thank you. I'm not very experienced with WikiProjects. I can also see your point that you belong to more than one Project, like Skepticism, where I've seen your good work plus Alt Med for example. Then again, many pages fall under multiple projects (though many of these are geographical) and it's about getting users with common interests and importantly willingness, to work together. I certainly think there's no harm in taking our time and scouring the project pages for the most recently active users to ask via User Talk so they get a notification icon when they visit Wikipedia, or simply waiting a bit longer for them to spot the discussion on their Watchlist. From the section where people did mention their projects (which I didn't think was requested in this section), most of those were in Skepticism or implied that they were and a number of them (but not all) have repeated their vote or opinion in this section. Interestingly most mentioned only one project within the list, presumably under the assumption that any overlap was still going to be captured within that scope. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dynamicimanyd (talk • contribs) 09:36, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
    This is, however, a reasonable central discussion place that can lead to separate "official" proposals at the specific combinations of pages. So if people are happy with this, then someone can go to AltMed, Homeopathy, and NLP and make a proposal at AltMed's talk apge involving only those pages and let that be the "real" one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment What this has identified is that there is no real support for the initial proposal, so I suggest that (unless something changes) that idea should be dropped. We can then focus on forwarding the second proposal, and look at whatever amendments we might need to make. A number of editors have given their support for this idea with the proviso that the affected project members are in agreement, so once we can conclude this debate we can start to look more closely at the viability of the alternate suggestion. I'm a member of the astrology project. Tento2 (talk) 10:22, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment I started the RfC because, despite Wolfie's admirable attempts to notify members of the projects he proposed for merger, they weren't speaking up. I thought the RfC process might catch their eye, or at least the eyes of a far broader range of editors than were participating. The RfC has only been open two days. I agree with Tento about whats it's demonstrated so far, but I think it should remain open for at least seven days, in the admittedly fading hope of getting more comments from uninvolved editors. I disagree that only members of the affected projects should be involved in the decision-making about merging projects. I am a member of none of these projects. But over time, I've been a member of others. I'd hate to see it become the norm that the WikiProject Council could merge projects without the affirmative assent of project members. I do not think silence can be taken for assent, and I do not see the harm in leaving WikiProjects dormant or moribund. New editors may choose to revive them. WP:CRYSTAL. And leaving them in hibernation wastes nothing but electrons, which we have in almost infinite supply. Server space is a thing the foundation has told us emphatically should not be the basis for deleting stuff. In my view, that applies to merging stuff, too. David in DC (talk) 16:21, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
    WikiProject Council does not merge anything. We only provide advice. I share your concerns, as I've seen one "silence is consent" merger go badly, but there is also the practical issue that if nobody is an active member at a dead project, then you can't actually get affirmative consent. To get around this (more or less), an extended period of notice is helpful. WP:There is no deadline, not even for getting dead WikiProjects merged. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 21 September 2013 (UTC)
Speaking as an at least listed member of damn near every WikiProject out there (I have an obsession with userboxes, 'kay?) ;), and having been involved in a some development and maintenance efforts of projects, unfortunately, a lot of people only join and either disappear or stop editing, don't actually watch the project talk page in general, or might not respond if they a comment there thinking "someone else will answer it," or any number of other reasons. I remember once, some months or years ago, going through and leaving individual talk page notices on the few active members of one group, noting a lot of others hadn't edited in "x" months or years, and getting exactly one response. So, yeah, I regret to say, particularly for groups which aren't particularly active, there isn't a lot of reason to expect a lot of responses. Unfortunately. John Carter (talk) 17:33, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Failure rate of collaborations

The discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Why_do_the_Collaboration_areas_of_WikiProjects_always_fail? will probably interest most of the people watching this page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Attention needed parameter

Wikiproject New Zealand uses an attention parameter and I have suggested that it be deleted. In turn, it was suggested to me that this proposal be advertised here. Please contribute to the discussion if you wish. Schwede66 07:52, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Stubs collaboration anyone?

Just happened to see this: User:Casliber/Stub contest. XOttawahitech (talk) 05:30, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Smart watchlists for WikiProjects

Hello all. Please see the idea I mention here which then does link to WT:MED sorry if that's too much. =) Maybe we can focus the conversation at Wikipedia talk:Growth (team)? Thanks all. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:06, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Or not, it looks like the conversation is focusing at Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard#Development_of_the_extension, perhaps. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:43, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Council?

Who, exactly, is on this WikiProject Council? Who are the members? Is the Council handled like a WikiProject and anyone who wants to can sign up? Or is this an appointed or elected group? There is surprisingly no information on the Council itself on Wikipedia:WikiProject Council. Additional information would be welcomed. Liz Read! Talk! 18:26, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

The "What Do We Do?" section more or less lists what the group is supposed to do, which was, initially, work on developing and improving WikiProjects and trying to make them in general more effective. I don't know if there actually is a membership list anymore, but, admittedly, didn't look for one either. In some cases, that's helping get proposed projects which have gotten sufficient interest to be started at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals up and running, sometimes other things to help make WikiProjects more effective and functional. At this point, it is, more or less, the WikiProject development and improvement answer line more than anything else. I don't know if that answers your questions, though. John Carter (talk) 18:32, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
The Signpost has answers to most of these questions. –Mabeenot (talk) 05:36, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
@Liz: Just wanted to use this opportunity to say that the Signpost has done a marvelous job of simplifying many wikiprojects by featuring them on the Signpost wikiproject report. XOttawahitech (talk) 14:47, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
For more on wikiprojects featured in the Signpost see: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Council#Alphabetical_list_of_WikiProjects_featured_in_the_Signpost XOttawahitech (talk) 16:10, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

How to create a WikiProject banner?

Can anyone point me to an explanation (hopefully one that does not require a PhD :-) of how to construct a wproj banner. I am asking because I just added what I thought was a banner for Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicinal botany to Talk:Chinese_herbology but instead got this: http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Talk:Chinese_herbology&oldid=580316034 Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 15:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure what you were trying to do in the example you shared, but the base for all WikiProject banners is Template:WPBannerMeta. It does not require advanced coding skills but there are several non-intuitive aspects of it, and there is some code around. If you set up importance and quality tagging for the WikiProject then that is a mess also as it requires that you set up lots of odd categories. I think there is a bot somewhere that can help set this up, but it may not be working. It is possible to set everything up manually. I have done this before and remember that it took me a few hours, and that I did it manually. I am not sure what else I remember. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:23, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
I am still not sure what you want. If a WikiProject exists, then people either make a banner for it or make it a task force project from an existing banner. If the project does not exist, then protocol says to get a community of supporters together to establish it. Once it is established, then create the banner and apply it as appropriate. If any of this sounds confusing then email me and we can talk it through by Skype or phone sometime. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:44, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Article alerts

I frequently come across WikiProjects(example) that appear to want to set up article alerts but don't know how to go about it. Just wondering if the council has documentation somewhere about this tool? XOttawahitech (talk) 20:58, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

No good documentation exists. No one has gathered the incomplete documentation which does exist. Many other wikiproject tools are similarly without documentation. Eventually there should be a plan to create documentation and list all available tools. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:03, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Article alerts.—Wavelength (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

1955 Packard Clipper

A) recently from Pawn Stars? - info that Studebacker and Packard joined in '52 to form the Stude-Packard company(?). It must not have lasted long, because... B) I am looking a buying a 1955 Packard Clipper - stunning car! Needs minimal restoration. And C) from your information, the company died by 1957.

I would love to find out how many of these things were built. From the seller I have learned that he's only found one other, restored, for sale. It had the first V-8 engine in production. Four wing windows - I'd buy it just for those! I miss them! A trunk large enough to bump off 4 or more bad guys and dump them in the desert! Lots of innovations that took a decade to take hold! Lap belts. He might have said disc brakes. My '63 Avanti has disc brakes all around. A dash along the lines of a ship, in perfect shape. Grew up in a '57 1/2 Ford Fairlane, also rare. Love the two-tone paint jobs of the day. It has the beginnings of fins. Two speed transmission.

This is going to be Fun! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.123.65.36 (talk) 07:32, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Article alerts

I frequently come across WikiProjects(example) that appear to want to set up article alerts but don't know how to go about it. Just wondering if the council has documentation somewhere about this tool? XOttawahitech (talk) 20:58, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

No good documentation exists. No one has gathered the incomplete documentation which does exist. Many other wikiproject tools are similarly without documentation. Eventually there should be a plan to create documentation and list all available tools. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:03, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Article alerts.—Wavelength (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

1955 Packard Clipper

A) recently from Pawn Stars? - info that Studebacker and Packard joined in '52 to form the Stude-Packard company(?). It must not have lasted long, because... B) I am looking a buying a 1955 Packard Clipper - stunning car! Needs minimal restoration. And C) from your information, the company died by 1957.

I would love to find out how many of these things were built. From the seller I have learned that he's only found one other, restored, for sale. It had the first V-8 engine in production. Four wing windows - I'd buy it just for those! I miss them! A trunk large enough to bump off 4 or more bad guys and dump them in the desert! Lots of innovations that took a decade to take hold! Lap belts. He might have said disc brakes. My '63 Avanti has disc brakes all around. A dash along the lines of a ship, in perfect shape. Grew up in a '57 1/2 Ford Fairlane, also rare. Love the two-tone paint jobs of the day. It has the beginnings of fins. Two speed transmission.

This is going to be Fun! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.123.65.36 (talk) 07:32, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

The future of stubs

I wonder whether a true stub, by the traditional assessment criteria, could survive our modern standards for inclusion. On the other side of that coin, I wonder whether a true stub is still a useful thing for Wikipedia. We've definitely seen a trend of "stub extinction", and I can't imagine an actual stub making it through AfC approval. Many things marked as stubs were not stubs, but more start class. Wikipedia is evolving and I wonder if it's time to reassess the assessment criteria, especially with regard to stubs. Gigs (talk) 17:11, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, stubs are still needed for notable topics. I don't know where you are finding the extinction occurring since I run in to them all over the place. We also have a continuing trend of long stubs, 100,000 characters or more. AfC is not the only way new articles get created. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:07, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
If you are considering a 100,000 character article a stub, then we definitely should reassess the assessment criteria. Gigs (talk) 19:46, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm not considering those as stubs, but other editors apparently do. At least based on the tagging of articles. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:17, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
Well, I think I've conflated two different issues, the usefulness of honest-to-goodness stubs, and our assessment criteria that seem to not match reality anymore. I think a discussion on the latter issue might be more productive. Gigs (talk) 18:27, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
I approve stubs quite often at AfC so I'm puzzled where the idea that AfC filters out stubs comes from. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:50, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
If a subject satifies notability criteria a stub is better than nothing. The whole idea of the WP assesments is to identify articles that are not developed enaugh for their importance. Couple that with maybe looking at pageview listings and check for stubs or start articles which come high in pageviews. There should be a tutorial around that gives a quick overview of the relevant bot-generated pages most projects do have to watchlist and identify such issues. This gives an endless supply of different articles to look at within your prefered subject area where you can help here and there in one way or another. Agathoclea (talk) 19:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Article assessment

I don’t know if this had already been discussed here in the past, but I see that there are more than half a million un-assessed wikiproject articles out of over 4 million total. Since I suspect most of these are stubs, I was wondering if the assessment of wp:stub articles can be automated since the template:stub is already used to classify such articles? XOttawahitech (talk) 14:40, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

It can be and has been in the past, but only if an individual WikiProject makes a bot request. I'd assume that the unassessed articles are at least as likely as the average article to be stubs, which probably means half or more of them. (Article assessment belongs to the WP:1.0 team, who may be able to point you in the right direction.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for responding WhatamIdoing, I asked this question after seeing that wp:WikiProject Canada has 2,597 un-assessed articles and would like to make a BOT request to rate those stubs. Not sure where to go next - I guess I will try the WP:1.0 team when I get a chance. XOttawahitech (talk) 20:48, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Ottawahitech, You might also want to see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Use_bots_to_save_work for links to some of the existing bots. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:54, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: Thanks for the pointer. I have not had a chance to look at the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Technical notes yet and I see there are no less than 7 BOTS in Category:Autoassessment bots. I wonder if anyone has used a BOT for auto-assessing articles, and if so what was the experience like. Thank in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 16:25, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
My experience was very limited and about five years ago (or even more? I was a pretty new editor then), so it's probably not useful. I think that WPMED had a bunch of articles tagged based on the categories they were in. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:22, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
I became aware of BOTs that put wiki-project banners on talk-pages when I participated briefly in wp:WikiProject Breakfast. Unfortunately the two main categories that were used for the tagging had been deleted thru a CFD, so I am unable to check if the bot also "assessed" stub articles. I am still hoping someone else will share their experience here. XOttawahitech (talk) 01:39, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

More on Project Assessments

The only wiki-projects that I have seen consistently assessing new articles assigned to them are WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Aviation.

WikiProject Canada has a dedicated editor who has been assessing articles for many years, but I have seen only one editor do this work in a project that has over 110 thousand articles.

Other wiki-projects seem to rely on editors who are not involved in their project, but do sweeping assessments for many wiki-projects assessing them all uniformly on the same talk page, but some wiki-projects articles are never assessed.

Just wondering if others see things the same way. Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences. XOttawahitech (talk) 01:27, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

How To Make a WikiProject?

HOW DO I MAKE A WIKIPROJECT? I READ THE ARTICLE, BUT IT DID NOT TELL ME HOW TO START! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Today's Xtra (talk • contribs) 22:19, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I also want to be a part of wikiproject.As i want to increase my knowledge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sadia.tasnim.raisa (talk • contribs) 14:58, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
@Sadia.tasnim.raisa: welcome to Wikipedia. What sort of project are you interested in? XOttawahitech (talk) 21:01, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
@Today's Xtra: Which article did you read? XOttawahitech (talk) 21:04, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
@Today's Xtra: The first step in creating a WikiProject is to make a bunch of friends who are interested in working with you. A WikiProject is people. You make a group of people on Wikipedia in approximately the same way that you make a group of people in the real world. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:11, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject name already taken as a redirect to a meta-Wikipedia WikiProject

I'd like to propose and start up a new WikiProject called Wikipedia:WikiProject Policy about policy, but as you can see the name is already taken and used to refer as a redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Policy and Guidelines. How do I go about this? I already have a sketch proposal on my user-page. Should I first start Wikipedia:WikiProject Policies? 20:11, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

@Bmekel: Just to clarify: Your proposal is to start a new Wikiproj that will look after all articles on Wikipeidia that deal with the topic of policy? XOttawahitech (talk) 06:26, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
The first step in creating a WikiProject is always to gather a group of people who are interested in working together with you. If you can't do that, then you should instead figure out what the most similar WikiProject is, and join them instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:14, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Seems like it would overlap a great deal with Wikipedia:WikiProject Politics. No matter the modern connotation, politics is about policy in the end. Gigs (talk) 19:32, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the fast answers! Yes the project's scope will involve both public and private policy and be related to these WikiProjects. Ok, I'll find more Wikipedians who might be interested in this topic (join here) and will see about the naming issue then. Bmekel (talk) 22:11, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Bible

In my Wiki-travels I just discovered WikiProject Bible for the first time. I was surprised, though, to see a Christianity-related talkpages banner on top of Wikipedia talk: WikiProject Bible. I had always assumed that the Bible was also important to Judaism. Was I wrong? XOttawahitech (talk) 06:17, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

These things usually just tell you who started the various groups, rather than trying to provide any content information.
However, I believe that Bible is taken by some people to be a Christian-specific term. I believe that something along the lines of Hebrew scriptures or Jewish scriptures (or something like that) is preferred for the same texts in a Jewish context. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:17, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for responding, WhatamIdoing. I must say what you said is news to me, and perhaps others who read Bible that starts with these words:The Bible.. is ... considered sacred in Judaism as well as in Christianity. The term Bible is shared between the two religions, . XOttawahitech (talk) 22:56, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Which wikiproject for an article on Exposition (narrative)?

This has never been a good article so far as I can see, always relying heavily on material from Writer's Digest. I may be the first person to have added an academic source after I removed a self-published source from a Writer's Digest affiliate company last night. Dougweller (talk) 06:25, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

For "Exposition" (version of 05:55, 18 June 2013),
see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Literature
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Music
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Music theory
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Culture (believed to be inactive)
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Trade (believed to be semi-inactive)
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Festivals (believed to be semi-inactive)
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Business
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Companies
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Albums
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Bible
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Judaism
and Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity.
—Wavelength (talk) 17:18, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
My bad. Actually this is an English or writing topic, not publishing. Sorry about the link to the dab page. And thanks for your comments. Dougweller (talk) 14:49, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

i dont know this type of stupidity

at1 one we use international link and your indian editer said no values of this though they uses unculture links like bollowood movie link article is Was there any romance about jodha Akbar.... how they r so cheap — Preceding unsigned comment added by SSA786 (talk • contribs) 01:46, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject United States

WPUSA was tagged with Semi-Active earlier today, but there's 12 threads on the talk page in the last 2 months, with over 15 participants. And there's a notice on the talk page, that if there's no response to the person posing a question, then the wikiproject must be inactive, and should so be tagged. What is the meaning of semi-active and inactive? -- 76.65.128.112 (talk) 05:31, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Have replied ...never a good thing to threaten to kill a project out of the blue. -- Moxy (talk) 03:40, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
The standards are documented at Template:WikiProject status/doc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks to Moxy and to WhatamIdoing for educating me. XOttawahitech (talk) 20:43, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
Extended content

== Where are the articles? ==

I am looking for the standard witki-table of article assessments for this project but cannot find it. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 16:57, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Oops sorry, I thought I was posting this to wikiproject Journalism. XOttawahitech (talk) 17:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Do/Should WikiProjects have the power over how the portals in their scope are used?

There was a discussion over whether the portals relevant to Wikipedia:WikiProject Film should be used in articles related to film. There are discussions about the case:

WhisperToMe (talk) 21:22, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

WikiProjects (a group of self-selected people) are encouraged to write WP:Advice pages. They are not permitted to tell the actual editors at any article that the WikiProject's advice must be followed. WikiProjects may not decree either the inclusion or the exclusion of any link to anything, portal or otherwise. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
In this case, an editor argued that WikiProject Film should have the right to say "we do not want Portal:Film" within Wikipedia articles and that whether Portal:Film in the United States should be included in articles should be between WikiProject United States and WikiProject Film WhisperToMe (talk) 23:01, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm not surprised, since something like this happens several times a year. WikiProjects are not power centers; they're groups of people who happen to want to work together. If the (official) guideline that I linked above isn't a sufficient explanation, then please squawk back for extra people to help explain it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:59, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
In response one editor says "Obviously guidelines are not policies, and are not designed to be adhered to stringently i.e. they are not binding. However, consensus is binding, and it is irrelevant where it it is formed: the article talk page, at a project page, or through an RFC." and "project members are capable of forming a consensus in a discussion just as any other group of people are." DarkWarriorBlake says "You're attempting to undermine your opposition by stating a WikiProject cannot make the rules, yet as Betty points out, take away the WikiProject, there is still a chorus singing against the inclusion of portals in these cases, and unless your backing group wants to argue for each and every case then there will always be that chorus who will sing against their inclusion, and since pretty muchg everything here short of vulgarity and offensiveness is a guideline, there is not and never will be a hard rule that backs you against those who don't believe in the use of portals." -- So they argue that people on WikiProject pages can make decisions and that guideline can be ignored in this instance. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Film#Cross_WikiProject_relations_and_decisions_about_portals WhisperToMe (talk) 16:18, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
I started Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal_to_add_Portal:Film_in_the_United_States_to_Gone_with_the_Wind_.28film.29 about a particular article but it seems to be moving into the WikiProject-related discussion. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:59, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Request for peer review

I'm trying to make the List of notable people under FVEY surveillance a featured list before Feb 11 so that we can include it for our project (Wikipedia:Surveillance awareness day). As time is running short, is someone willing to help me to do a peer review? That would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

-A1candidate (talk) 22:58, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

@A1candidate: I just wonder if Wikipedia:Surveillance awareness day is a WikiProject? Thanks for taking the time, XOttawahitech (talk) 16:39, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

UN geoscheme overuse (abuse)

There have been many controversies regarding the use of the UN geoscheme ( http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:United_Nations_geoscheme ), mainly because it is rather arbitrary, in some cases untraditional (UK in Northern Europe, Poland in Eastern Europe and Slovenia in Southern Europe), it makes more difficult to see the whole picture (continent) and the UN statistical division did not imply any universal use of it (if so-to the reverse): http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49.htm . Meanwhile, there are articles emerging on the basis of the United Nations geoscheme such as: http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:List_of_political_parties_by_United_Nations_geoscheme. What is the stance of the Admins?--89.128.236.143 (talk) 00:23, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

The stance of the admins is that they have no special powers when it comes to article content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:40, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study

Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 18:02, 2 February 2014 (UTC).

The Wikipedia Signpost is a wonderful reservoir of information about wikipedia. Of particular interest to this wiki-project is the weekly Signpost WikiProject report (currently written by the talented user:Mabeenot). This column has been running since 2007 and has since covered many wikipedia wikiprojects (some more than once). These articles serve as excellent introductions for those new to a project.

Since there are so many different kinds of wikiprojects all comprising different systems/tools/people/subjects/nationalities/etc I find this topic fascinating, and have been systematically trying to catalog all wikiprojects that have been featured in the Signpost alphabetically. So far I have managed to complete only projects covered in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and some of 2007 2011 and 2013. If you are as keen as I am to locate Signpost articles about a certain wikiproject try clicking: Category:WikiProjects in The Signpost by name

I would apprciate any feedback – positive and negative. Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 02:35, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

This should be highlighted as an asset of the WikiProject Council. Perhaps this also should be highlighted as a reference work about Wikipedia itself; now that so many pieces of journalism are collected, these articles together present a depiction of the scope and culture of Wikipedia. I am not sure what ought to be in this collection but it seems significant to me that it exists. Perhaps also this should be permanently featured somehow somewhere in working pages of The Signpost itself. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:18, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
@Bluerasberry: Just wondering if anyone would object to adding Category:WikiProjects in The Signpost by name to wp: WikiProject Council XOttawahitech (talk) 15:52, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
Ottawahitech I am not sure of what is going on but that seems reasonable. I value this list. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:59, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Just wanted to add that this work by user:Mabeenot goes almost unnoticed which is a real shame. For example members of featured projects rarely reply to comments posted at the end of their repective signpost feature, missing a golden opportunity to gain more (quality?) members.X XOttawahitech (talk) 15:31, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Just a note: This category survived a category deletion nomination and is now facing a redirects deletion nomination. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:58, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikiproject proposal

Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Neutral Editors I'd like to invite this group to be apart of this discussion as I certainly feel this group could help. Serialjoepsycho (talk) 01:57, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost is finally out - Olympics

...with a wikiproject report covering WikiProject Russia. Too bad this report, which by the way was ready days ago, could not be published before the opening of the Olympic games. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:44, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Gambling: rhythm playing Bally electromechanical slot machines

I'm struggling to understand how to do this so please bear with me. I would like to contribute some, as yet, undisclosed knowledge about gambling as it relates to electromechanical slot machines made by Bally Mfr.

Myself, as well as a handful of other people were able to consistently win while playing a particular (model #1090) Bally machine. I would like to emphasize that we beat the machines legally, by using proper timing and technique as to when and how to pull the handle of the slot. Nothing about this technique was illegal and I managed to make a very good living playing dollar machines in Reno and Las Vegas for over four years, until the electromechanical machines were replaced by electronic machines with random number generators.

We called this technique "rhythm playing." So little is known about it that even what little has been published on the subject is full of misinformation. See: <Dwight and Louise Crevelt's book titled "Slot Machine Mania," Page 142, section titled "Rhythm Method.">

Since no mention of rhythm playing is made in your section on gambling or slot machines, I would like to provide some input on the subject but am totally overwhelmed by the process of doing so with Wikipedia. So, I ask if there might be someone who could guide me in the process. I'm not even sure how to see if anyone responds to this request so I ask that I be contacted through my email: poststump@yahoo.com DWPost 03:02, 11 February 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwpost (talk • contribs)

I am afraid that Wikipedia isn't the best place to publish your discoveries and personal experiences: normally the only information that achieves consensus has already been published elsewhere. You might find other websites more welcoming of your research.
More information at Wikipedia's No Original Research page.
--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 16:32, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Interesting Village pump (proposals) discussion ongoing

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 110#Restrict A class usage. --Izno (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Class=Draft

Given that the Draft namespace has been in use for a while I would like to propose that a Class rating of "Draft" be added to the default set of "class=" parameters for WikiProject banner templates.

One of the big advantages of the new Draft namespace is the ability to place WikiProject banners on the Talk pages of the Draft pages. This has the effect of notifying relevant Projects of the existence of the draft article. A class=Draft parameter would consequently enable WikiProjects to correctly handle such drafts in their article improvement systems. Another advantage of having a "class=Draft" parameter is that the successor to the current Articles for Creation system would be able to use it in it's systems and procedures. So far I have seen that WP:WikiProject U.S. Roads has already added such a parameter to their banner template, so a precedent already exists. Thanks Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:48, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

@Dodger67: I could not agree more! As it is the wp:Drafts name space seems to be doomed as a storage location for rejects with no way to navigate (categories are removed from articles). XOttawahitech (talk) 17:34, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
That's really a question for the WP:1.0 team. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
Sorry for asking so many questions, but when I went to WP:1.0 I saw: "This group was formed in late 2004 to meet this challenge of offline release version of Wikipedia". Just curious to find out how this ties into the topic of drafts in assessments? Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 16:17, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
Ottawahitech: Every time the WP 1.0 team makes an offline release, it makes an automated selection of articles based on class and importance. That team also created various tools that organize articles according to class, importance and topic. To make this happen, most wikiprojects have class and importance in their talk page banners, and some have an organized assessment program and improvement drives that use data from the WP 1.0 tools. I think it would be nice if the stats tools that are most widely used were extended to recognize drafts: even without typing 'Draft' into a template. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:26, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
@Hroðulf: Sorry, I am having trouble with wiki-jargon here. When you say wp:class do you mean wp:namespace? XOttawahitech (talk) 15:15, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ottawahitech: Firstly, it turns out that categories are not necessarily stripped from draft articles. Apparently that is still an open discussion. Secondly, I didn't say wp:class - we are discussing article class. In the article assessment system, each article can have a class ranging from Stub, Start, C, B, GA good article, A, FA featured article, and in some cases Draft. The details are at: Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment. Does that help? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 17:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
@Hroðulf: Thanks for taking the time to explain Class. As far as stripping Categories is concerned, the article which I created and moved into draft space has already been stripped of its categories a while ago. XOttawahitech (talk) 00:42, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
@Dodger67: When you get a chance, I checked Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads#Assessment and review to see what drafts this wikiproject has, but cannot find any "Drafts" in their table. Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 16:07, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
@Ottawahitech: I found Draft:Big X when I looked through Special:PrefixIndex/Draft:. I'm not a techie at all so I have no idea why it isn't in their table, perhaps the Project's table hasn't been updated since before the draft was created/tagged or their implementation of the Draft parameter is faulty? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:34, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
@Dodger67: Too bad! I thought wp:draft was a good idea, even moved one of the articles I created to it. But without access to wikiprojects and categories I don’t see how anyone will ever find it, sigh… XOttawahitech (talk) 15:29, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
@Ottawahitech: We can only credit the "wonderful support" that Drafts is getting from the WikiProject Council for this! :( You can use WikiProject banners on Drafts but without the class=Draft parameter being implemented by default on all WikiProject banners most of the Projects concerned will not actually be able to use the presence of the banner in their article improvement system. I've raised the Category issue elsewhere. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:20, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
Once again, WikiProject Council does not control article assessment. The thing you want to fix is the bot for Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. This is the WikiProject Council, which is not the Version 1.0 Editorial Team. These are unrelated groups of people. In fact, I think I'm the only person in the entire community who has posted to both of those talk pages in the last couple of years. If you want to fix the problem, then go to their existing discussion about it and see if you can help them. Talking to the wrong people isn't going to do any good whatsoever. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:54, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Since 27 December, the code at Template:Class mask has supported Draft-class for any projects that want to use it. It is not added by default (this would require adding a huge number of new categories, and not all projects will want it anyway), but you can just add |draft=yes to the custom class mask to enable it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:37, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

My understanding is that at some point what goes on at WP:AFC will happen in the draft namespace instead.
With AfC at the moment, if one wants to make a wikiproject aware that there is an AfC draft that falls within their project topic, the only way to do so is to post to the project talk page and explain the situation in detail. Sometimes I take the extra time to do so, often I don't. If wikiprojects are prepared to have a draft classification for pages in their topic area, it would be possible, for example, for the AfC helper script to allow assignment of a draft to one or more wikiprojects when declining or commenting on the draft. This would make it hugely easier for drafts to be assigned to wikiprojects, and thus allow those wikiproject members interested in new drafts to find and contribute to them easily. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 18:38, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
The idea is that all drafts in the Draft-space will be tagged with relevant WikiProject banners and "class=Draft" will be included in such banners as a matter of course - thus it is simply logical that all WikiProjects should be able to recognize the significance of such banners. Making "class=Draft" an optional parameter means that hardly any will actually implement it thus negating at least half of the entire rationale for Draft-space to even exist at all. One of the major differences between Draft-space and drafts in User or WT/AFC space is that Draft-space pages are amenable to collaborative draft-writing, while User-space and AfC drafts are constructed by only one editor - the newbie. Having experienced editors with specific subject experience actively helping the newbie to construct their article is the whole point. AfC reviewers currently only post to Project talk pages if the reviewer feels that the input of subject specialist, as a reviewer, is specifically required. The "class=Draft" parameter will serve as a "general notification" to WikiProjects that a relevant draft article exists and that they are welcome to contribute to its construction. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:34, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
@MSGJ: Would you be kind enough to explain to the non-techie’s here how Template:Class mask can be utilized on wikiprojects? Are there any projects that are using it, as an example? Can this info be added to wp:WikiProject Council? XOttawahitech (talk) 15:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
It should presumably be added to the template documentation.
Roger, a WikiProject might prefer to assess a page's actual status, rather than its location. A few WikiProjects reject the list-class on the same grounds. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:54, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
For example, the video game project is using the draft-class (see Category:Draft-Class video game articles) and the change was made here. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:35, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

What support is WikiProject Council offering to wikiprojects?

@Dodger67: @WhatamIdoing: I believe Roger is raising a legitimate point above. I know wikiprojects are discouraged from starting up without the blessing of the "council". But it is not clear to me who sits on the council, and what type of support they offer. Why for example, did I get only one editor offering feedback on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Council#Alphabetical_list_of_WikiProjects_featured_in_the_Signpost ( thank you user:Bluerasberry!)? Is it a bad idea, bad implementation, other? XOttawahitech (talk) 01:20, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

The council is whoever is here on the discussion page. The deterrent from starting new groups is supposed to just be a pause to chat with proposers so that they plan their group for success, and is not actually supposed to put anyone off from doing whatever they like. It just is not expressed in a way that conveys this support. I am not sure what to do here. I will be here commenting for a while and I made a proposal for reform of some things with others meta:Grants:IdeaLab/WikiProject_management_suite but I do not have capacity for much else except to give comments and be available for chat. I would like this group developed but it is not obvious what should be done without eager labor to devote to it. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:28, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
@Bluerasberry: Thanks for clarifying WikiProject Council. I know my own confusion came about from the name. To me a council has a connotation of a group of elected officials who make decisions on behalf of others, such a a city council for example. XOttawahitech (talk) 18:45, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
A council is also just a group of interested people that come together to discuss things. Which is what this would be. -DJSasso (talk) 13:24, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Categories in drafts

@Hroðulf: Thanks so much for providing the link above. I posted a question about it to the talkpage of the user who removed the categories from the Draft article. XOttawahitech (talk) 12:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Merger of two projects

I have started a discussion on merger of two wikiprojects - WikiProject Women scientists and WikiProject Women of psychology. Your input is welcome here. Djembayz (talk) 20:37, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Great wikiproject report in the Signpost

Check it out: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias in The Signpost. XOttawahitech (talk) 12:23, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Adding "Forum" Button next to "Talk" button on Wikipedia

It would be nice if Wikipedia added a "Forum" button next to the "talk" button on Wikipedia articles so that people can talk about the subject of the article without fear of thought police deleting something that was added to the Talk page and claiming it was under the guidelines that the Talk page is not a forum. I am entering this here because I can not begin to figure out how to properly propose that this feature of a FORUM button be added next to the TALK button on Wikipedia so I am hoping someone will do it for me. 2602:306:C518:6C40:5C5D:F920:659:AC04 (talk) 02:10, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

See "List of Internet forums" and Category:Internet forums and http://www.forumsinfo.com.
—Wavelength (talk) 02:15, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Hi 2602. As Wavelength has pointed out, this is an explicit community consensus - it is not thought police, but rather, a community-agreed policy that the talk pages should not be used to discuss and opine on the topic of the article. We are here to build an encyclopedia, not to discuss the impact of Obama's healthcare policy on corporate spending. There are plenty of other places on the internet devoted to hosting such discussions, and I doubt very much you'd get consensus to have wikipedia start hosting such discussions. Now, admittedly, sometimes talk-page discussions do drift into opining on the topic, but usually someone will bring people back to the purpose, which is building an encyclopedia.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 02:30, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Hi 2602. I've spent some time recently looking over all the WF entities, and it did occur to me that a lot of topics which would be useful to a lot of people, like maybe cookbooks?, might be best constructed by having some sort of "Forum" page somewhere, which can then be used to prepare a first draft of a more formal content page. So, following on the cookbook example, maybe it might be possible, perhaps at WikiNews, to get together some sort of regular columns, or a sort of monthly magazine, which could include articles about topics of an other-than-encyclopedic nature, say for instance meat loaf recipes. One way, maybe, of doing that would be to have some "forum" pages on given topics open for discussion, along the lines of some National Public Radio call in shows for instance, where people can add comments which can, if they choose, then be used in a "column" type feature in some sort of regular WikiNews "publication." But that would be a matter better dealt with by one of the other Wikimedia Foundtion entity, because a lot of that sort of material which might be well represented in a radio talk show format really isn't what would be called encyclopedic enough for inclusion here. John Carter (talk) 02:55, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
@2602:306:C518:6C40:5C5D:F920:659:AC04: I totally agree. Having a forum type page attached to each article, in addition to a talkpage, will accomplish:
  • Letting non-editors let off some steam and not try to post what is considered off-topic comments to talkpages
  • Create a more friendly atmosphere where non-editors and newbies feel more appreciated
  • Allow for a more collaborative approach to building articles
However, this topic is off-topic here, I think. XOttawahitech (talk) 18:58, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
see WP:NOTAFORUM -if you want this changed you'd have to have a broad based RFC, you could start at VPP. You are welcome to try, consensus can change, but my sense is wikipedians on the whole don't want this to change. There are IRC channels maintained by the foundation, as well as help desks and reference desks, but maintaining potentially 4 million new forums, that would need to be patrolled and monitored for BLP violations just seems like non-workable to me.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 22:05, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
John Carter Wikibooks has a large and well-developed Cookbook which is supported both by a community sharing recipes and photographers sharing food pictures. Wikinews and Wikiversity also host more conversation. I think you are correct to advise looking at other Wikimedia projects for advancing this idea. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:07, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Creating talk pages in order to place WikiProject template

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines/Archive 9 § Central points: Creating talk pages
 – Perhaps I'll get an answer at this venue. -- -- -- 01:56, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Should one create a talk page in order to place a {{WikiProject}} template on it? Or should it be created for certain WikiProjects but not for others (for example WikiProject Disambiguation and/or WikiProject Anthroponymy)? If so, how would one know which yes & which not? -- -- -- 01:56, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Should one create a talk page in order to place a {{WikiProject}} template on it? yes.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:10, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @-- -- --: Thanks for posting. I was not aware of these interesting wikiprojects, why should they be treated differently than other projects? Just curious. XOttawahitech (talk) 19:26, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
    • Sorry for not explaining. The answer is because after creating several talk pages for disambiguation pages in order to place the {{WikiProject Disambiguation}} template on them, I noticed that the WikiProject Disambiguation page states:

On talk pages:

  • {{WikiProject Disambiguation}} - Project banner for talk pages with discussion. Please do not use to create talk pages that have no discussion.
and for some reason I thought that the same might apply to WikiProject Anthroponymy. -- -- -- 04:10, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
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