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I'm really not at all sure what to make of Wikipedia:WikiProject Peace. Any ideas out there? John Carter ( talk) 13:20, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Some editors of WikiProject Classical music, who clearly state in their banner and intro that their scope are all articles related to classical music, that aren't covered by other music related projects have been going around biography pages of classical musicians removing infoboxes under the blanket claim that the single guideline on the project page Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music#Biographical infoboxes even though their very project maintains these pages are not within its scope (every biography is already covered by the Musicians Wikiproject which promotes infoboxes). The main culprit here is User:Kleinzach who appears to be effectively asserting ownership on these pages claiming a group of editors at the Classical music WikiProject have reached a "consensus" to not have infoboxes. But the discussion rarely ever involves people not involved with the WikiProject and why should it? The articles are within their scope. And yet every time an pro-infobox editor drags in editors from the outside, (See archives) Kleinzach disregards their views because the editors were notified by canvassing. The fact is there is far larger consensus with biographies to have infoboxes.
Can the council please do something to stop the WikiProject obtaining false consensus and then ownership of the articles on classical musicians. Let it be noted Joseph Szigeti passed a FAC with an infobox so it's not even as if the infobox contravenes the manual of style! 128.232.251.233 ( talk) 00:24, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
User IP 128.232.251.233 is probably the same person as 131.111.213.37. The latter IP has been used more often on WP and has been associated with a number of disruptions. -- Kleinzach ( talk) 07:59, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
The WikiProject Classical music should IMHO do what the name implies - cover all articles about classical music. The problem is there are three similar WikiProjects – WikiProject Opera, WikiProject Composers and WikiProject Contemporary (Classical) Music, both of which are very well organised to the point that the three projects have coexisted as sister projects rather than (in my opinion) the more natural hierarchical structure of WP:Classical music being the parent project of Opera and Composers (as potentially taskforces).
This has led to the rather clumsy wording of WP:Classical music's scope. It is true that at the moment our banner only seems to appear on classical music compositions and no classical musicians. Even worse, we don't seem to cover classical music theory and classical musical terminology. There is an ongoing discussion started by me over at WP:CM that we should start a new WikiProject WP:Classical musicians to cover Classical musicians and shift WP:CM to a more compositions and the theory behind them and leave the people involved with classical music to another project. This would be the natural intersection with WP:BIO and could potentially merge with WP:Composers.
OK, enough with the WikiProject management - the issue of infoboxes. Some time ago there was a big clash between certain members of WP:BIO/WP:Microformats and WP:Composers/WP:Opera/WP:CM over whether to include infoboxes in all classical musician biographies. One user (Pigsonthewing) was so pointy about this he left a bad taste in many editors' mouths to the point of making many totally against the idea of infoboxes. It was then decided infoboxes should not be used and guidelines were put down in WP:CM saying just that. The thing is though during this discussion, an editor from WP:CM did design quite a nice infobox: User:Turangalila/sandbox/Infobox composer which seems to address the issue that the current infoboxes are geared towards popular and modern musicians rather than classical musicians. However, I think most editors are against this infobox being used as well.
My own view is slowly warming to infoboxes. Having created the bare bones to many of Mendelssohn's chamber works, I find myself repeating the same information in every stub article - name, opus number, key, date of composition, length, movements etc. - all of which would fit perfectly into an infobox (see a crude first attempt). Also given virtually every other page seems to be using infoboxes, it seems classical music articles have to come around some time. Heck, not too long ago we opposed project banners and rating systems. Now we have at least began to rate articles in our banner as stubs, GA or FA (I still strongly oppose making a distinction between Start and B-Class as I don't want an article to have to be reviewed in order to become a B-Class, that's would a third tier of reviews!).
So in conclusion, I admit our statement of project scope is a mess and the spirit of this project is to cover all classical music articles. That should not be in doubt. How we do that (one big project with taskforces or lots of sister projects) is still up in the air. But I think we really need to think long and hard about infoboxes. Centy – reply• contribs – 03:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to clarify the inter-relationship of projects. This has created a lot of problems with confusion over where conductors and classical insrumentalists fall. (Singers are treated as belonging to WP:Opera.) In my opinion, CM should really be a parent to the others just as it is a child of Music. Although opera is a stage art, I regard it is more related to classical music than to theatre. Contemporary music is again a sub-genre of classical music and reports are that Composers is largely classically oriented. In which case all should be sub-projects of CM or task forces. I would be interested in opinions of Council project members on appropriate structures, so that a formal proposal can be produced. Then the awkwardness of CM's scope could be resolved.-- Peter cohen ( talk) 14:11, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I think all WikiProjects should have an interest in this, so I thought I'd bring this to your attentions. Please see the proposal and comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Wikiproject namespace.-- Pharos ( talk) 23:19, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
It has been suggested that [the Participants] section be split into a new page.
Although the label (and the problem, in my opinion) persists, I see no discussion here. This list is taking up at least two-thirds of the page; am I the only one who thinks that it should be moved? Smaller lists of participants have had such treatment, and we have almost 150 Councellors in our rolls (although more than half of them are probably inactive).
To me, such a move does not look controversial in the least. I cannot see why we cannot do a little house-keeping around here. The place is becoming increasingly messy (and dusty—we could use a roll call). Waltham, The Duke of 22:02, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
:D
. Anyone else think a roll-call is appropriate?
Happy‑
melon 22:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)<outdent>You're right: if the list can be cleaned up and maintained, it would have quite a lot of potential. I'm thinking that if we put a little effort into updating and maintaining the list, it could pay off in the log run. – Clockwork Soul 02:35, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
As I have the feeling that this discussion will take some time, I put the list of participants in a nested pane as suggested. I don't pretend this to be the final solution, but at least now I can view this page without tiring my scroll-finger... -- StevenDH ( talk) 01:26, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
The 'internal templates' used in the Directory are not in the Template namespace, I would like to move them but they will need new names. How about:
Template location/name now | Proposed |
---|---|
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide header | do nothing with this redirect |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Header | ProjectDirectory Boilerplate |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Links | ProjectDirectory Links |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject | ProjectDirectory Entry |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject footer | ProjectDirectory Footer |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject header | ProjectDirectory Header |
, or something like that.
And while I'm at it, I could put stuff like Template:WikiProject in Category:WikiProject Council templates, right? I've also been looking in Category:WikiProjects (but that's stuff for another day), there seem to be a number of users who have subpages which are built from Template:WikiProject but are not actually WikiProjects. Is there something akin to Template:Project but usable for announcing that a page is not in fact a WikiProject? Okay, that's actually three questions, what do you think about them? -- StevenDH ( talk) 02:08, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh, I wasn't aware of the template-in-subpage-putting, I just thought all templates belong in the Template namespace. Indirectly it causes some strange things like pages in the nonexistant Category:Wikipedia documentation. Anyway, that leaves the questions of filling Category:WikiProject Council templates with stuff that's got {{ WPCouncil}} on its talk page; and the non-{{ Project}} template (see below). -- StevenDH ( talk) 22:20, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I just saw the general call for folks from wikiprojects to sign in on the participant page here, and that might be the solution to a problem we face at WP:STYLE1.0. We have the mission of seeing where we have broad consensus to run "style bots" for simple formatting matters that are tedious to conform by hand and that no one would mind. (Candidates are: hyphens and dashes, making sure "External links" is at the end of articles when it exists, and checking citation formats; if you can think of other things in the same category, please respond here or at WP:STYLE1.0.) After we do a poll, we've got a few more steps, then we'll report back to WP:VPP where we started.
So ... the problem you might be able to help me with is, I'd like to contact a lot of people because we don't want to run a bot of any kind without wide agreement that the goals are non-controversial, but I don't want to post notices on 200 wikiproject pages for simple style questions, that's spammy. I noticed you guys just made notifications all around for people to check in here ... possibly we could post a notice somewhere here where people would see it as they check in? - Dan Dank55 ( talk) 03:31, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
{{
cent}}
but more WikiProject-oriented. Any objections?
Happy‑
melon 11:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)Actually the reason I got here in the first place: this category is an utter mess. I suppose a system of categories for WikiProjects could be useful besides the Directory, but not if it's in its current shape. I complained about the messines here, but we didn't actually do anything. Do you have suggestions as to how to proceed? If we would clean out the whole thing, we'll come across userpages claiming to be WikiProjects when there's a 'regular' WikiProject about that subject available, that's where we could use a {{this is not the real WikiProject, look here instead}}-template to prevent forking. As a side question, do all WikiProjects have to be located like Wikipedia:WikiProject Foo? I have the impression that some people are really working in those userpage WikiProjects.
Oh yes, excuse my accusations that the Directory is messy too if it isn't. But I do think it could use at least some kind of visual legend for the impatient (like me). -- StevenDH ( talk) 23:19, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
{{
Project}}
or similar, which would automatically categorise into one of the active subcategories, but would switch to categorising into an inactive category if a timestamp was not regularly updated (say once a month or so). A warning could be introduced a week before the recategorisation occurred, whereupon the banner could switch to looking more like {{
Inactive}}
. Thoughts?
Happy‑
melon 12:59, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
This is definitely relevant to the Council - I should have posted this last night.
Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 March 26#Template:WikiProjectBanners. All discussion welcome (the more sensible, the better - you'll be fighting an uphill battle :D
)
Happy‑
melon 14:33, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Is there a WikiProject for bivalves? (There is one for gastropods). GrahamBould ( talk) 07:25, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I put a proposal to the WikiProject Council suggesting that WikiProject:Fishing be renamed Fishing and fisheries. User:Iwilleditu added a fatuous comment and then seems to have deleted the proposal.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether this procedure needs to be followed for a simple rename. The project is already well established. If the project members agree on a name change, can that change just be made without wider consultation? -- Geronimo20 ( talk) 19:48, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
A party has recently initiated discussion regarding the existing structure of the Proposals page be changed. A summary of the discussion to date can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Proposals#New proposed changes. Any interested parties are welcome to voice their opinions so that we can arrive at consensus regarding this matter. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 14:51, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I've created a traffic statistics page for WP:VG, and thought that similar pages for other WikiProjects could be benefitial. One way in which these statistics have been useful for our WikiProject is that we've now realised that our much-neglected Portal:VG is in fact the most viewed page in the entire WikiProject, so we're now discussing ways to improve the portal on WT:VG. What would truly be fantastic would be to get a bot to generate such reports for every WikiProject automatically. Would that be feasible? JACO PLANE • 2008-04-3 21:42
I'm posting here to announce that I'm currently developing an application called Igor, a Java-based standalone WikiProject management tool that will allow its user to more easily maintain the often tedious and laborious tasks of managing a medium to large WikIProject. Upon its completion, it will provide a straight-forward and user-friendly GUI allowing:
I have started a page for screenshots and information on Igor's features and progress. I'm also very early in the development phase, so suggestions and ideas are very welcome (and encouraged!). I will hopefully be making Igor available for testing in the next couple of weeks. Cheers! – Clockwork Soul 21:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
The first release of Igor will be available for testing within two days (as soon as I can get the SourceForge account set up). Take a look if you're interested! – Clockwork Soul 05:24, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
The first release of Igor (v0.1) is now available. Take a look at its page for more information. By the way, Duke, I think you'll enjoy the temporary splash image. ;) – Clockwork Soul 22:28, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
We have recently found a situation in which the leading coordinators of two large, actively coordinated projects have stepped down from that position. This may be a situation which hadn't been anticipated very clearly in the Project Guide, but I think is something that we would reasonably want to cover. If anyone has any idea how to give it a try, I think we would all welcome it. My own idea, for what little that might be worth, would be to maybe include some sort of section indicating what sorts of things would be good to have done before such a retirement, and maybe indicating somewhere a couple of pointers for new managers, like maybe at least reviewing the Top and High importance articles to the project. Any other ideas, which would probably be better than mine, would be welcome, particularly in the guide. John Carter ( talk) 15:20, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi. We're discussing the introduction of project banners on sv.wiki but we currently seem to lack the possibility of collapsing these templates. Could anyone tell me where I can find the two classes collapsible and collapsed that are needed in order for the template to work? / Lokal _ Profil 16:00, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
Seeing (Un?)Happy-Melon's post above, perhaps this is quite an appropriate time to cross post on this. We are considering a clarification and rewrite of the assessment scheme description, please comment/help here. Thanks! Walkerma ( talk) 20:44, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
The new PagesInCategory feature has shone some possibly unwelcome light into the darker reaches of Wikipedia: glancing at, say, Category:Start-Class articles and Category:GA-Class articles, it is now immediately apparent that there isn't the same number of subcategories in each, which of course there should be. Some "X-Class Foo articles" aren't in the appropriate master category, some are in the wrong category, some are even in more than one class mastercategory at the same time! I've compiled a list of projects Foo for which the numbers of "X-Class Foo articles" don't add up: User:MelonBot/1.0 assessment, and I'd very much appreciate any help in fixing these. It's too fiddly and individual to automate: I've already persuaded the members of one category that they really can't be FA, A and B all at the same time (:D) and cleaned up a handful of category typos that were never deleted, but I'd welcome any assistance. In that table, the number indicates how many of that project's assessment categories are in the master category for that class: a zero means the category either doesn't exist (I've restored a couple that were CSD#C1'd!!) or isn't categorised properly, and a number greater than one means that at least one of the project's assessment categories is double-tagged. Happy‑ melon 18:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
Over at WP:VG, we're currently having a discussion on inactive project cleanup. We'd like to reduce the number of sub-projects in order to reduce confusion and encourage new editors to join in centralised discussion and debate. As a number of projects have been tagged as inactive for some time, we feel it's now appropriate to downgrade them and redirect editors to a more centralised point. We've taken the approach that a project should be downgraded to a taskforce first before being removed comepletely.
Question is, is this approach valid? As the group here is focused on good project use, I wanted to ask for further insight, advice and expertise on our approach. Is it appropriate to remove out of date project banners from article talk pages? What about userboxes/barnstars/other templates? Is there anything we've overlooked or that we should be doing as part of this process? While we're keen to go through this, we don't want to break anything in the process. In addition, if there are any tool suitable for making this easier please let me know.
Many thanks for your responses and taking the time to help out! With a bit of luck, we should be able to improve the inclusiveness of WP:VG going forward as a result of this exercise. -- Gazimoff ( talk) 22:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I think WikiProjects really need to have more standardized names for their banners. Stuff like 'ArthropodTalk' and 'EvolWikiProject' are too unpredictable. I think it should be made a standard that every project's banner can be reached via 'Template:WikiProject [Project's Name]' (directly or via redirect). For instance I have just created Template:WikiProject Physics and Template:WikiProject Engineering - both were red links. If the same name less the 'WikiProject' part (e.g. Template:Physics, Template:Ecology are available, they should be used too, though they may be wanted for navigational templates in the future. Richard001 ( talk) 01:28, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
|nested=
code that appears in all project banners, a bot would have to alter the code on all project banners. Again, this would be easier to code if all project banners were named similarly. This isn't so much a "solution to a problem" but trying to make things easier for ourselves in future: if we'd had {{
ambox}}
from the beginning, we wouldn't have crashed the servers in standardising article warning templates. Having things standardised wherever possible is of enormous benefit to automated processes, because if it takes a human a few minutes to work out that {{
AARTalk}}
is a project banner, how the hell is a computer supposed to work it out?
Happy‑
melon 22:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
{{
AARTalk}}
to. Would I therefore be correct in saying that to automate the move process you would have to list all the templates and the pages to which they would have to be moved to?
Hiding
T 23:05, 22 April 2008 (UTC){{
AARTalk}}
moved no matter what convention we decide on!). The
Template:WikiProject Foo nomenclature has the advantage that it is already used by a narrow majority of the banners in
CAT:WPB, although
Template:WP Foo is also popular.
Happy‑
melon 11:19, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
I just wanted to point out something that may come in handy here... the newest feature that I'm currently working on for Igor is the "Wikiproject Browser" which compiles and merges the information from the following sources:
The result is a list of all but a few Wikiprojects (as far as I can tell), their relationships (or absence thereof), and a plethora of other bits of information, including all of the project banners they use. I'm considering also creating a bot to compile this list on a nightly basis and upload it to a server as an XML document. Whether we decide to move or create redirects for banners, or even just allow the status quo to persist a while, such a list would make anything we need to do quite a bit easier to automate. This feature will be available in the next couple of weeks. – Clockwork Soul 03:40, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) Current MfDs are as follows:
Also, Wikipedia:WikiProject StarCraft has been redirected to a taskforce page. No MfDs have been raised to cleanup yet. Hope this helps, Gazimoff Write Read 22:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I have Igor merging data from several sources, and although it isn't quite complete it should be by this time tomorrow. Below is a small snippet of actual data showing information for different projects.
<Wikiprojects> <Projects> <Project id="BEER" name="Beer"> <Status active="yes" igor="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3ABeer_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FBeer_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FBeer_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> <Banner name="WikiProject Beer" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="Beer" redirect="no" /> <Banner name="WPBEER" redirect="yes" /> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="MOLECULAR_AND_CELLULAR_BIOLOGY" name="Molecular and Cellular Biology"> <Status active="yes" igor="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3AMCB_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FMCB_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FMCB_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> <Banner name="Wikiproject MCB" redirect="no" /> <Banner name="WikiProject MCB" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="Wikiproject mcb" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="MCB" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="WPMCB" redirect="yes" /> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="TIMESPLITTERS" name="TimeSplitters"> <Status active="no" igor="no" mfd="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="no" /> <Banner-templates> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="BASEBALL" name="Baseball"> <Status active="yes" igor="no" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3AOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> </Banner-templates> <Warnings count="1"> <Warning>Project page collision: "Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball" (Baseball/Old-time Base Ball)</Warning> </Warnings> </Project> <Projects> </Wikiprojects>
Its final version will also include a <Project-tree> section below the <Projects> section that'll detail the relationships of the various projects more or less as laid out on the WP Council directory. I think I have just about everything in there, but does anybody have any thoughts about how it might be improved? – Clockwork Soul 01:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
There has been a lot of discussion about the massive backlog of Wikipedia articles flagged for cleanup, and how to remedy this. My hope is that the topical WikiProjects could play a larger role in the cleanup process, if they can become aware of articles in need of attention within their scope (which is currently not that easy).
In an attempt to improve the situation, I offer to generate project-specific listings of articles flagged for cleanup. See further details here: User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings
I am currently looking for some WikiProjects that would be willing to give this new method a try. Volunteers are welcome. -- B. Wolterding ( talk) 10:28, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
I've created a bot request for something that could move inactive people (the user/project can set the time limit) to an 'inactive list', so as to avoid giving the impression of more activity than there really is. Richard001 ( talk) 11:43, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
I just cleared out all the members starred removing those possibly no longer interested. Hopefully i didn't remove others as well, please readd yourself if i did or still interested. Simply south ( talk) 16:25, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
I've posted the first machine readable wikiproject document at http://igor.sourceforge.net/data/wikiprojects.xml. So far it contains the merged data from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory, and in the next few days will also include a scan of Category:WikiProject banners and all WP namespace pages beginning with "Wikiproject" and "WikiProject". The data it contains is based in large part on user-edited pages and templates, so it may be a little quirky in spots, especially in places where it had to guess (like the project banner templates), but I'm hoping that'll just motivate us to clean up the sources. I'm going to update this document at least once every couple of days with a compressed (wikiprojects.xml.gz) and non-compressed version. If anybody has any recommendations or requests, I'm all ears! – Clockwork Soul 02:37, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
The document is updated, and there's also a gzipped copy in the same directory. I've added some improvements, specifically:
There are still a few glitches I want to fix, and improvements I want to make, but it's well on its way. – Clockwork Soul 07:09, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
I would like to advertise the new template {{ PageStatus}}, which makes WikiProject lists of articles easier to manage. Some WikiProjects may find it quite useful! -- Aquillyne-- ( talk) 20:27, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Ok, I think we have come to an agreement above that standardising all the WikiProject banner templates on some consistent naming convention, whatever that might be. The question now is, how to proceed? We need to decide, probably in consultation with the WikiProjects, which standard to adopt, and how thoroughly to adopt it. Should we recommend, for instance, that all the redirects be deprecated and ask each project to change their assessment documentation to encourage people to use the raw banner? I think this might be excessive, but I'm just throwing it out for comment.
I have some statistics which might be helpful in choosing a convention: of the 1129 banners in CAT:WPB, the possible conventions currently occur with the following frequencies:
Syntax | Frequency |
---|---|
WikiProject_ | 544 |
WP | 148 |
WikiProject | 51 |
WP_ | 39 |
Wikiproject_ | 16 |
Wikiproject | 11 |
Wp | 6 |
Wp_ | 0 |
Other | 314 |
I would recommend WikiProject_Project be chosen, if only to minimise the number of projects affected. But I think we need to hear comments from Council members and possibly from WikiProjects as well. How should we proceed? Should I have MelonBot post a message on the talk pages of all the "other" projects (which will be affected no matter what convention we adopt) to seek their input? Happy‑ melon 13:32, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
I would like to echo Kirill that I can't see any sufficient rationale for standardization - what, again, is the problem if the templates stay where they are and redirects to them exist for the "standard" name? Girolamo Savonarola ( talk) 20:16, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
{{WikiProject Foo}}
, they get the project banner for WikiProject Foo. What we're saying is that there are two options to do this; option 1 is to go through the list of WikiProjects and create any redirecs of the form
Template:WikiProject Foo which don't exist already, to the appropriate template. Option 2 is to go through and move any WikiProject banners which are at odd names ({{
AARTalk}}
to {{
WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles}}
, for instance) to their correct locations, which will create redirects from the old location to the standardised one automatically. Both options will consume a similar quantity of server resources and human time (just moving the templates wouldn't require editing the talk pages or even add them to the job queue). However, the move option has several other advantages that I can see, mainly from the perspective of future bot- or script-based work with WikiProject banners. From the perspective of the person who'll probably end up writing the script to do whichever option we decide on, I would also say that the move option will be significantly easier to program. I hope that clarifies things as I see them, anyway.
Happy‑
melon 10:36, 29 April 2008 (UTC)My take, redirects are cheap and there for this kind of reason :) -- Ned Scott 09:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't see the purpose either. Renaming templates en masse has a non-negligible potential to alienate some WikiProjects, and is overall unnecessary work for everybody. Redirects were created for these situations. Titoxd( ?!? - cool stuff) 10:50, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject AIDS}}
, I want to get the banner for
WikiProject AIDS - that is, of course, the most important issue.
Happy‑
melon 11:41, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) Let me add two notes on the WikiProject banner standardization. First, thinking of automation, it would be really beneficial to have the banner template names standardized. For example, it is currently impossible in the notability listings to include links to the associated WikiProjects, or even to list the projects by name - it's just impossible to infer the name of the project from the banner template. Second, a note about redirects. When working with mass data, it is often impossible to retrieve data from the live Wiki, but one needs to work with database dumps. Actually, for performance reasons the actual text of the talk pages etc. cannot be parsed - one needs to work with the "templatelinks" table which stores the template associations. That works fine with template redirects as long as the "shortcut template" redirects to the "canonical template" - but not vice versa. And as long as the "canonical template" is listed in CAT:WPB. With "canonical template", I'm refering to something like {{ WikiProject Yellow tulips}}, while the "shortcut template" might be {{ WPYTtalk}}. -- B. Wolterding ( talk) 18:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
I see a significant possible disadvantage to this, which is that it will encourage people to treat the templates as generic tags that can be applied without thought. The Math project tag, Template:maths rating, is not intended to be a generic marker for math pages. As its name says, it is intended only for rating articles, and it should only be added if all the assessment information is filled in. We have had issues in the past with people adding it to thousands of pages without assessing them - those bot edits were reverted by consensus of the math project. Every once in a while someone has to go through and assess the article where a tag was mistakenly placed without assessment info, and we don't want to encourage more of those. That's why Template:WikiProject Mathematics is the way it is. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:19, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Maths}}
, see the warning, and revert; whereas currently they would quite probably go to
CAT:WPB, find {{
maths rating}}
, and place it without further thought. I think it's fair to say that 99% of WikiProjects don't use their project banners this way, and would very much appreciate uninvolved editors tagging pages for them; for those projects which don't want that, well, we're not trying to prescribe what has to be at
Template:WikiProject Foo, only that something should be :D.
Happy‑
melon 11:42, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
I'm really not at all sure what to make of Wikipedia:WikiProject Peace. Any ideas out there? John Carter ( talk) 13:20, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Some editors of WikiProject Classical music, who clearly state in their banner and intro that their scope are all articles related to classical music, that aren't covered by other music related projects have been going around biography pages of classical musicians removing infoboxes under the blanket claim that the single guideline on the project page Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music#Biographical infoboxes even though their very project maintains these pages are not within its scope (every biography is already covered by the Musicians Wikiproject which promotes infoboxes). The main culprit here is User:Kleinzach who appears to be effectively asserting ownership on these pages claiming a group of editors at the Classical music WikiProject have reached a "consensus" to not have infoboxes. But the discussion rarely ever involves people not involved with the WikiProject and why should it? The articles are within their scope. And yet every time an pro-infobox editor drags in editors from the outside, (See archives) Kleinzach disregards their views because the editors were notified by canvassing. The fact is there is far larger consensus with biographies to have infoboxes.
Can the council please do something to stop the WikiProject obtaining false consensus and then ownership of the articles on classical musicians. Let it be noted Joseph Szigeti passed a FAC with an infobox so it's not even as if the infobox contravenes the manual of style! 128.232.251.233 ( talk) 00:24, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
User IP 128.232.251.233 is probably the same person as 131.111.213.37. The latter IP has been used more often on WP and has been associated with a number of disruptions. -- Kleinzach ( talk) 07:59, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
The WikiProject Classical music should IMHO do what the name implies - cover all articles about classical music. The problem is there are three similar WikiProjects – WikiProject Opera, WikiProject Composers and WikiProject Contemporary (Classical) Music, both of which are very well organised to the point that the three projects have coexisted as sister projects rather than (in my opinion) the more natural hierarchical structure of WP:Classical music being the parent project of Opera and Composers (as potentially taskforces).
This has led to the rather clumsy wording of WP:Classical music's scope. It is true that at the moment our banner only seems to appear on classical music compositions and no classical musicians. Even worse, we don't seem to cover classical music theory and classical musical terminology. There is an ongoing discussion started by me over at WP:CM that we should start a new WikiProject WP:Classical musicians to cover Classical musicians and shift WP:CM to a more compositions and the theory behind them and leave the people involved with classical music to another project. This would be the natural intersection with WP:BIO and could potentially merge with WP:Composers.
OK, enough with the WikiProject management - the issue of infoboxes. Some time ago there was a big clash between certain members of WP:BIO/WP:Microformats and WP:Composers/WP:Opera/WP:CM over whether to include infoboxes in all classical musician biographies. One user (Pigsonthewing) was so pointy about this he left a bad taste in many editors' mouths to the point of making many totally against the idea of infoboxes. It was then decided infoboxes should not be used and guidelines were put down in WP:CM saying just that. The thing is though during this discussion, an editor from WP:CM did design quite a nice infobox: User:Turangalila/sandbox/Infobox composer which seems to address the issue that the current infoboxes are geared towards popular and modern musicians rather than classical musicians. However, I think most editors are against this infobox being used as well.
My own view is slowly warming to infoboxes. Having created the bare bones to many of Mendelssohn's chamber works, I find myself repeating the same information in every stub article - name, opus number, key, date of composition, length, movements etc. - all of which would fit perfectly into an infobox (see a crude first attempt). Also given virtually every other page seems to be using infoboxes, it seems classical music articles have to come around some time. Heck, not too long ago we opposed project banners and rating systems. Now we have at least began to rate articles in our banner as stubs, GA or FA (I still strongly oppose making a distinction between Start and B-Class as I don't want an article to have to be reviewed in order to become a B-Class, that's would a third tier of reviews!).
So in conclusion, I admit our statement of project scope is a mess and the spirit of this project is to cover all classical music articles. That should not be in doubt. How we do that (one big project with taskforces or lots of sister projects) is still up in the air. But I think we really need to think long and hard about infoboxes. Centy – reply• contribs – 03:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to clarify the inter-relationship of projects. This has created a lot of problems with confusion over where conductors and classical insrumentalists fall. (Singers are treated as belonging to WP:Opera.) In my opinion, CM should really be a parent to the others just as it is a child of Music. Although opera is a stage art, I regard it is more related to classical music than to theatre. Contemporary music is again a sub-genre of classical music and reports are that Composers is largely classically oriented. In which case all should be sub-projects of CM or task forces. I would be interested in opinions of Council project members on appropriate structures, so that a formal proposal can be produced. Then the awkwardness of CM's scope could be resolved.-- Peter cohen ( talk) 14:11, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I think all WikiProjects should have an interest in this, so I thought I'd bring this to your attentions. Please see the proposal and comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Wikiproject namespace.-- Pharos ( talk) 23:19, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
It has been suggested that [the Participants] section be split into a new page.
Although the label (and the problem, in my opinion) persists, I see no discussion here. This list is taking up at least two-thirds of the page; am I the only one who thinks that it should be moved? Smaller lists of participants have had such treatment, and we have almost 150 Councellors in our rolls (although more than half of them are probably inactive).
To me, such a move does not look controversial in the least. I cannot see why we cannot do a little house-keeping around here. The place is becoming increasingly messy (and dusty—we could use a roll call). Waltham, The Duke of 22:02, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
:D
. Anyone else think a roll-call is appropriate?
Happy‑
melon 22:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)<outdent>You're right: if the list can be cleaned up and maintained, it would have quite a lot of potential. I'm thinking that if we put a little effort into updating and maintaining the list, it could pay off in the log run. – Clockwork Soul 02:35, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
As I have the feeling that this discussion will take some time, I put the list of participants in a nested pane as suggested. I don't pretend this to be the final solution, but at least now I can view this page without tiring my scroll-finger... -- StevenDH ( talk) 01:26, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
The 'internal templates' used in the Directory are not in the Template namespace, I would like to move them but they will need new names. How about:
Template location/name now | Proposed |
---|---|
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide header | do nothing with this redirect |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Header | ProjectDirectory Boilerplate |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Links | ProjectDirectory Links |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject | ProjectDirectory Entry |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject footer | ProjectDirectory Footer |
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject header | ProjectDirectory Header |
, or something like that.
And while I'm at it, I could put stuff like Template:WikiProject in Category:WikiProject Council templates, right? I've also been looking in Category:WikiProjects (but that's stuff for another day), there seem to be a number of users who have subpages which are built from Template:WikiProject but are not actually WikiProjects. Is there something akin to Template:Project but usable for announcing that a page is not in fact a WikiProject? Okay, that's actually three questions, what do you think about them? -- StevenDH ( talk) 02:08, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh, I wasn't aware of the template-in-subpage-putting, I just thought all templates belong in the Template namespace. Indirectly it causes some strange things like pages in the nonexistant Category:Wikipedia documentation. Anyway, that leaves the questions of filling Category:WikiProject Council templates with stuff that's got {{ WPCouncil}} on its talk page; and the non-{{ Project}} template (see below). -- StevenDH ( talk) 22:20, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I just saw the general call for folks from wikiprojects to sign in on the participant page here, and that might be the solution to a problem we face at WP:STYLE1.0. We have the mission of seeing where we have broad consensus to run "style bots" for simple formatting matters that are tedious to conform by hand and that no one would mind. (Candidates are: hyphens and dashes, making sure "External links" is at the end of articles when it exists, and checking citation formats; if you can think of other things in the same category, please respond here or at WP:STYLE1.0.) After we do a poll, we've got a few more steps, then we'll report back to WP:VPP where we started.
So ... the problem you might be able to help me with is, I'd like to contact a lot of people because we don't want to run a bot of any kind without wide agreement that the goals are non-controversial, but I don't want to post notices on 200 wikiproject pages for simple style questions, that's spammy. I noticed you guys just made notifications all around for people to check in here ... possibly we could post a notice somewhere here where people would see it as they check in? - Dan Dank55 ( talk) 03:31, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
{{
cent}}
but more WikiProject-oriented. Any objections?
Happy‑
melon 11:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)Actually the reason I got here in the first place: this category is an utter mess. I suppose a system of categories for WikiProjects could be useful besides the Directory, but not if it's in its current shape. I complained about the messines here, but we didn't actually do anything. Do you have suggestions as to how to proceed? If we would clean out the whole thing, we'll come across userpages claiming to be WikiProjects when there's a 'regular' WikiProject about that subject available, that's where we could use a {{this is not the real WikiProject, look here instead}}-template to prevent forking. As a side question, do all WikiProjects have to be located like Wikipedia:WikiProject Foo? I have the impression that some people are really working in those userpage WikiProjects.
Oh yes, excuse my accusations that the Directory is messy too if it isn't. But I do think it could use at least some kind of visual legend for the impatient (like me). -- StevenDH ( talk) 23:19, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
{{
Project}}
or similar, which would automatically categorise into one of the active subcategories, but would switch to categorising into an inactive category if a timestamp was not regularly updated (say once a month or so). A warning could be introduced a week before the recategorisation occurred, whereupon the banner could switch to looking more like {{
Inactive}}
. Thoughts?
Happy‑
melon 12:59, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
This is definitely relevant to the Council - I should have posted this last night.
Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 March 26#Template:WikiProjectBanners. All discussion welcome (the more sensible, the better - you'll be fighting an uphill battle :D
)
Happy‑
melon 14:33, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Is there a WikiProject for bivalves? (There is one for gastropods). GrahamBould ( talk) 07:25, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I put a proposal to the WikiProject Council suggesting that WikiProject:Fishing be renamed Fishing and fisheries. User:Iwilleditu added a fatuous comment and then seems to have deleted the proposal.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether this procedure needs to be followed for a simple rename. The project is already well established. If the project members agree on a name change, can that change just be made without wider consultation? -- Geronimo20 ( talk) 19:48, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
A party has recently initiated discussion regarding the existing structure of the Proposals page be changed. A summary of the discussion to date can be found at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Proposals#New proposed changes. Any interested parties are welcome to voice their opinions so that we can arrive at consensus regarding this matter. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 14:51, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I've created a traffic statistics page for WP:VG, and thought that similar pages for other WikiProjects could be benefitial. One way in which these statistics have been useful for our WikiProject is that we've now realised that our much-neglected Portal:VG is in fact the most viewed page in the entire WikiProject, so we're now discussing ways to improve the portal on WT:VG. What would truly be fantastic would be to get a bot to generate such reports for every WikiProject automatically. Would that be feasible? JACO PLANE • 2008-04-3 21:42
I'm posting here to announce that I'm currently developing an application called Igor, a Java-based standalone WikiProject management tool that will allow its user to more easily maintain the often tedious and laborious tasks of managing a medium to large WikIProject. Upon its completion, it will provide a straight-forward and user-friendly GUI allowing:
I have started a page for screenshots and information on Igor's features and progress. I'm also very early in the development phase, so suggestions and ideas are very welcome (and encouraged!). I will hopefully be making Igor available for testing in the next couple of weeks. Cheers! – Clockwork Soul 21:48, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
The first release of Igor will be available for testing within two days (as soon as I can get the SourceForge account set up). Take a look if you're interested! – Clockwork Soul 05:24, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
The first release of Igor (v0.1) is now available. Take a look at its page for more information. By the way, Duke, I think you'll enjoy the temporary splash image. ;) – Clockwork Soul 22:28, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
We have recently found a situation in which the leading coordinators of two large, actively coordinated projects have stepped down from that position. This may be a situation which hadn't been anticipated very clearly in the Project Guide, but I think is something that we would reasonably want to cover. If anyone has any idea how to give it a try, I think we would all welcome it. My own idea, for what little that might be worth, would be to maybe include some sort of section indicating what sorts of things would be good to have done before such a retirement, and maybe indicating somewhere a couple of pointers for new managers, like maybe at least reviewing the Top and High importance articles to the project. Any other ideas, which would probably be better than mine, would be welcome, particularly in the guide. John Carter ( talk) 15:20, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi. We're discussing the introduction of project banners on sv.wiki but we currently seem to lack the possibility of collapsing these templates. Could anyone tell me where I can find the two classes collapsible and collapsed that are needed in order for the template to work? / Lokal _ Profil 16:00, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
Seeing (Un?)Happy-Melon's post above, perhaps this is quite an appropriate time to cross post on this. We are considering a clarification and rewrite of the assessment scheme description, please comment/help here. Thanks! Walkerma ( talk) 20:44, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
The new PagesInCategory feature has shone some possibly unwelcome light into the darker reaches of Wikipedia: glancing at, say, Category:Start-Class articles and Category:GA-Class articles, it is now immediately apparent that there isn't the same number of subcategories in each, which of course there should be. Some "X-Class Foo articles" aren't in the appropriate master category, some are in the wrong category, some are even in more than one class mastercategory at the same time! I've compiled a list of projects Foo for which the numbers of "X-Class Foo articles" don't add up: User:MelonBot/1.0 assessment, and I'd very much appreciate any help in fixing these. It's too fiddly and individual to automate: I've already persuaded the members of one category that they really can't be FA, A and B all at the same time (:D) and cleaned up a handful of category typos that were never deleted, but I'd welcome any assistance. In that table, the number indicates how many of that project's assessment categories are in the master category for that class: a zero means the category either doesn't exist (I've restored a couple that were CSD#C1'd!!) or isn't categorised properly, and a number greater than one means that at least one of the project's assessment categories is double-tagged. Happy‑ melon 18:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
Over at WP:VG, we're currently having a discussion on inactive project cleanup. We'd like to reduce the number of sub-projects in order to reduce confusion and encourage new editors to join in centralised discussion and debate. As a number of projects have been tagged as inactive for some time, we feel it's now appropriate to downgrade them and redirect editors to a more centralised point. We've taken the approach that a project should be downgraded to a taskforce first before being removed comepletely.
Question is, is this approach valid? As the group here is focused on good project use, I wanted to ask for further insight, advice and expertise on our approach. Is it appropriate to remove out of date project banners from article talk pages? What about userboxes/barnstars/other templates? Is there anything we've overlooked or that we should be doing as part of this process? While we're keen to go through this, we don't want to break anything in the process. In addition, if there are any tool suitable for making this easier please let me know.
Many thanks for your responses and taking the time to help out! With a bit of luck, we should be able to improve the inclusiveness of WP:VG going forward as a result of this exercise. -- Gazimoff ( talk) 22:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I think WikiProjects really need to have more standardized names for their banners. Stuff like 'ArthropodTalk' and 'EvolWikiProject' are too unpredictable. I think it should be made a standard that every project's banner can be reached via 'Template:WikiProject [Project's Name]' (directly or via redirect). For instance I have just created Template:WikiProject Physics and Template:WikiProject Engineering - both were red links. If the same name less the 'WikiProject' part (e.g. Template:Physics, Template:Ecology are available, they should be used too, though they may be wanted for navigational templates in the future. Richard001 ( talk) 01:28, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
|nested=
code that appears in all project banners, a bot would have to alter the code on all project banners. Again, this would be easier to code if all project banners were named similarly. This isn't so much a "solution to a problem" but trying to make things easier for ourselves in future: if we'd had {{
ambox}}
from the beginning, we wouldn't have crashed the servers in standardising article warning templates. Having things standardised wherever possible is of enormous benefit to automated processes, because if it takes a human a few minutes to work out that {{
AARTalk}}
is a project banner, how the hell is a computer supposed to work it out?
Happy‑
melon 22:41, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
{{
AARTalk}}
to. Would I therefore be correct in saying that to automate the move process you would have to list all the templates and the pages to which they would have to be moved to?
Hiding
T 23:05, 22 April 2008 (UTC){{
AARTalk}}
moved no matter what convention we decide on!). The
Template:WikiProject Foo nomenclature has the advantage that it is already used by a narrow majority of the banners in
CAT:WPB, although
Template:WP Foo is also popular.
Happy‑
melon 11:19, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
I just wanted to point out something that may come in handy here... the newest feature that I'm currently working on for Igor is the "Wikiproject Browser" which compiles and merges the information from the following sources:
The result is a list of all but a few Wikiprojects (as far as I can tell), their relationships (or absence thereof), and a plethora of other bits of information, including all of the project banners they use. I'm considering also creating a bot to compile this list on a nightly basis and upload it to a server as an XML document. Whether we decide to move or create redirects for banners, or even just allow the status quo to persist a while, such a list would make anything we need to do quite a bit easier to automate. This feature will be available in the next couple of weeks. – Clockwork Soul 03:40, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) Current MfDs are as follows:
Also, Wikipedia:WikiProject StarCraft has been redirected to a taskforce page. No MfDs have been raised to cleanup yet. Hope this helps, Gazimoff Write Read 22:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Okay, I have Igor merging data from several sources, and although it isn't quite complete it should be by this time tomorrow. Below is a small snippet of actual data showing information for different projects.
<Wikiprojects> <Projects> <Project id="BEER" name="Beer"> <Status active="yes" igor="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3ABeer_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FBeer_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FBeer_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> <Banner name="WikiProject Beer" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="Beer" redirect="no" /> <Banner name="WPBEER" redirect="yes" /> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="MOLECULAR_AND_CELLULAR_BIOLOGY" name="Molecular and Cellular Biology"> <Status active="yes" igor="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3AMCB_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FMCB_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FMCB_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> <Banner name="Wikiproject MCB" redirect="no" /> <Banner name="WikiProject MCB" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="Wikiproject mcb" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="MCB" redirect="yes" /> <Banner name="WPMCB" redirect="yes" /> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="TIMESPLITTERS" name="TimeSplitters"> <Status active="no" igor="no" mfd="yes" /> <V-1-membership-info member="no" /> <Banner-templates> </Banner-templates> </Project> <Project id="BASEBALL" name="Baseball"> <Status active="yes" igor="no" /> <V-1-membership-info member="yes"> <Category>Category%3AOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality</Category> <Statistics>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality_statistics</Statistics> <Log>Wikipedia%3AVersion_1.0_Editorial_Team%2FOld-time_Base_Ball_articles_by_quality_log</Log> </V-1-membership-info> <Banner-templates> </Banner-templates> <Warnings count="1"> <Warning>Project page collision: "Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball" (Baseball/Old-time Base Ball)</Warning> </Warnings> </Project> <Projects> </Wikiprojects>
Its final version will also include a <Project-tree> section below the <Projects> section that'll detail the relationships of the various projects more or less as laid out on the WP Council directory. I think I have just about everything in there, but does anybody have any thoughts about how it might be improved? – Clockwork Soul 01:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
There has been a lot of discussion about the massive backlog of Wikipedia articles flagged for cleanup, and how to remedy this. My hope is that the topical WikiProjects could play a larger role in the cleanup process, if they can become aware of articles in need of attention within their scope (which is currently not that easy).
In an attempt to improve the situation, I offer to generate project-specific listings of articles flagged for cleanup. See further details here: User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings
I am currently looking for some WikiProjects that would be willing to give this new method a try. Volunteers are welcome. -- B. Wolterding ( talk) 10:28, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
I've created a bot request for something that could move inactive people (the user/project can set the time limit) to an 'inactive list', so as to avoid giving the impression of more activity than there really is. Richard001 ( talk) 11:43, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
I just cleared out all the members starred removing those possibly no longer interested. Hopefully i didn't remove others as well, please readd yourself if i did or still interested. Simply south ( talk) 16:25, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
I've posted the first machine readable wikiproject document at http://igor.sourceforge.net/data/wikiprojects.xml. So far it contains the merged data from Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory, and in the next few days will also include a scan of Category:WikiProject banners and all WP namespace pages beginning with "Wikiproject" and "WikiProject". The data it contains is based in large part on user-edited pages and templates, so it may be a little quirky in spots, especially in places where it had to guess (like the project banner templates), but I'm hoping that'll just motivate us to clean up the sources. I'm going to update this document at least once every couple of days with a compressed (wikiprojects.xml.gz) and non-compressed version. If anybody has any recommendations or requests, I'm all ears! – Clockwork Soul 02:37, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
The document is updated, and there's also a gzipped copy in the same directory. I've added some improvements, specifically:
There are still a few glitches I want to fix, and improvements I want to make, but it's well on its way. – Clockwork Soul 07:09, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
I would like to advertise the new template {{ PageStatus}}, which makes WikiProject lists of articles easier to manage. Some WikiProjects may find it quite useful! -- Aquillyne-- ( talk) 20:27, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Ok, I think we have come to an agreement above that standardising all the WikiProject banner templates on some consistent naming convention, whatever that might be. The question now is, how to proceed? We need to decide, probably in consultation with the WikiProjects, which standard to adopt, and how thoroughly to adopt it. Should we recommend, for instance, that all the redirects be deprecated and ask each project to change their assessment documentation to encourage people to use the raw banner? I think this might be excessive, but I'm just throwing it out for comment.
I have some statistics which might be helpful in choosing a convention: of the 1129 banners in CAT:WPB, the possible conventions currently occur with the following frequencies:
Syntax | Frequency |
---|---|
WikiProject_ | 544 |
WP | 148 |
WikiProject | 51 |
WP_ | 39 |
Wikiproject_ | 16 |
Wikiproject | 11 |
Wp | 6 |
Wp_ | 0 |
Other | 314 |
I would recommend WikiProject_Project be chosen, if only to minimise the number of projects affected. But I think we need to hear comments from Council members and possibly from WikiProjects as well. How should we proceed? Should I have MelonBot post a message on the talk pages of all the "other" projects (which will be affected no matter what convention we adopt) to seek their input? Happy‑ melon 13:32, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
I would like to echo Kirill that I can't see any sufficient rationale for standardization - what, again, is the problem if the templates stay where they are and redirects to them exist for the "standard" name? Girolamo Savonarola ( talk) 20:16, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
{{WikiProject Foo}}
, they get the project banner for WikiProject Foo. What we're saying is that there are two options to do this; option 1 is to go through the list of WikiProjects and create any redirecs of the form
Template:WikiProject Foo which don't exist already, to the appropriate template. Option 2 is to go through and move any WikiProject banners which are at odd names ({{
AARTalk}}
to {{
WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles}}
, for instance) to their correct locations, which will create redirects from the old location to the standardised one automatically. Both options will consume a similar quantity of server resources and human time (just moving the templates wouldn't require editing the talk pages or even add them to the job queue). However, the move option has several other advantages that I can see, mainly from the perspective of future bot- or script-based work with WikiProject banners. From the perspective of the person who'll probably end up writing the script to do whichever option we decide on, I would also say that the move option will be significantly easier to program. I hope that clarifies things as I see them, anyway.
Happy‑
melon 10:36, 29 April 2008 (UTC)My take, redirects are cheap and there for this kind of reason :) -- Ned Scott 09:57, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't see the purpose either. Renaming templates en masse has a non-negligible potential to alienate some WikiProjects, and is overall unnecessary work for everybody. Redirects were created for these situations. Titoxd( ?!? - cool stuff) 10:50, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject AIDS}}
, I want to get the banner for
WikiProject AIDS - that is, of course, the most important issue.
Happy‑
melon 11:41, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) Let me add two notes on the WikiProject banner standardization. First, thinking of automation, it would be really beneficial to have the banner template names standardized. For example, it is currently impossible in the notability listings to include links to the associated WikiProjects, or even to list the projects by name - it's just impossible to infer the name of the project from the banner template. Second, a note about redirects. When working with mass data, it is often impossible to retrieve data from the live Wiki, but one needs to work with database dumps. Actually, for performance reasons the actual text of the talk pages etc. cannot be parsed - one needs to work with the "templatelinks" table which stores the template associations. That works fine with template redirects as long as the "shortcut template" redirects to the "canonical template" - but not vice versa. And as long as the "canonical template" is listed in CAT:WPB. With "canonical template", I'm refering to something like {{ WikiProject Yellow tulips}}, while the "shortcut template" might be {{ WPYTtalk}}. -- B. Wolterding ( talk) 18:54, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
I see a significant possible disadvantage to this, which is that it will encourage people to treat the templates as generic tags that can be applied without thought. The Math project tag, Template:maths rating, is not intended to be a generic marker for math pages. As its name says, it is intended only for rating articles, and it should only be added if all the assessment information is filled in. We have had issues in the past with people adding it to thousands of pages without assessing them - those bot edits were reverted by consensus of the math project. Every once in a while someone has to go through and assess the article where a tag was mistakenly placed without assessment info, and we don't want to encourage more of those. That's why Template:WikiProject Mathematics is the way it is. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 11:19, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
{{
WikiProject Maths}}
, see the warning, and revert; whereas currently they would quite probably go to
CAT:WPB, find {{
maths rating}}
, and place it without further thought. I think it's fair to say that 99% of WikiProjects don't use their project banners this way, and would very much appreciate uninvolved editors tagging pages for them; for those projects which don't want that, well, we're not trying to prescribe what has to be at
Template:WikiProject Foo, only that something should be :D.
Happy‑
melon 11:42, 2 May 2008 (UTC)