This page relates to the WikiProject Council, a collaborative effort regarding
WikiProjects in general. If you would like to participate, please visit the
project discussion page.CouncilWikipedia:WikiProject CouncilTemplate:WikiProject CouncilCouncil articles
A1: A WikiProject is a group of people who want to work together. It is not a subject area, a collection of pages, or a list of articles
tagged by the group.
A3: Nobody knows, because not all participants add their names to a membership list, and membership lists are almost always out of date. You can find out which projects' main pages are being watched by the most users at
Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers.
Q4: Which WikiProject has tagged the most articles as being within their scope?
A4:WikiProject Biography has tagged about 2.05 million articles, which is more than three times the size of the second largest number of pages tagged by a WikiProject. About ten groups have tagged more than 100,000 articles. You can see a list of projects and the number of articles they have assessed
here.
Q5: Who gets to decide whether a WikiProject is permitted to tag an article?
A5: That is the exclusive right of the participants of the WikiProject. Editors at an article may neither force the group to tag an article nor refuse to permit them to tag an article. See
WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN.
Q6: I think a couple of WikiProjects should be merged. Is that okay?
A6: You must ask the people who belong to those groups, even if the groups appear to be inactive. It's okay for different groups of people to be working on similar articles. WikiProjects are people, not lists of articles. If you identify and explain clear, practical benefits of a merger to all of the affected groups, they are likely to agree to combining into a larger group. However, if they object, then you may not merge the pages. For less-active groups, you may need to wait a month or more to make sure that no one objects.
Q7: I want to start a WikiProject. Am I required to advertise it at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals and/or have a specific number of editors support it?
A7: No, there are no requirements. However, new WikiProjects, especially new groups that are proposed by new editors, rarely remain active for longer than a few months unless there are at least six or eight active editors involved at the time of creation.
@
SMcCandlish, thanks for this note. I'm sorry I didn't see it until now. There's a (non-RM) process for merging WikiProjects that respects the fact that WikiProjects are groups of people, rather than groups of pages, and that sometimes a division is due to human reasons (e.g., personality conflict).
I do agree with the sentiment that many WikiProjects need to be merged up to bigger groups. One could imagine, e.g., this wine group as well as
Wikipedia:WikiProject Beer becoming part of the more generic
Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Beverages Task Force. The problem is that this process takes a couple of hours per full merge, and nobody wants to do that systematically.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 19:05, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
Well, there should never be a wikiproject split (or failure of one to merge that needs to merge) on the basis of two editors having a personality conflict. That would be a
WP:PROJECTFORK. If two editors have an issue with each other, they need
dispute resolution, or for one or both of them to simply withdraw from the topic area if the dispute remains intractable after DR attempts. A merge of two projects into one might take a few hours, but is not all that big a deal. It's not like merging hundreds of articles or something. —
SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 20:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
A WikiProject is not a process of any sort, so it won't ever fall under the heading of ==Process forks==.
Are you volunteering to merge up WikiProjects? I think I could literally keep you busy for a thousand hours with that, if you're willing. The first one or two are the hardest, but after you've done it a few times, it does get faster. You've already got the template editor user right, which will help with the banners.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:25, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
I would be down to help, if I had a list of the most wanted/relevant WikiProjects for merger. I'd rather merge two active/semi-active projects than bother with defunct projects. I'd also love to read documentation somewhere of what needs merging. Asides from archives of past discussions, categories for the different importance/quality categories...anything else? ~ 🦝
Shushugah (he/him •
talk) 00:50, 17 January 2024 (UTC)reply
The usual thing is to merge a defunct or barely active WikiProject into an active one. Some examples include:
See
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces for a checklist. These pages don't necessarily need to be converted to task forces (=separate sub-pages), but it should give you an idea of what needs to be covered. Off hand, there's moving or redirecting all the pages+sub-pages, the talk-page banner itself (e.g.,
Template:WikiProject Capitalism), the cats produced by the banner, any userboxes or special barnstars the group made, and any cats produced by the userboxes. But the first step is to find a group that seems to be too small and another group they could merge into, and asking them if they are willing to have the groups merged. Like trying to merge groups of kids in school, if they don't want to play together, we can't really make them, but most are willing.
On the size of the groups: I don't think I'd recommend small steps. For example, if everyone is willing, it's probably better to jump straight from "Turtles" up to "Animals", because the "Animals" group isn't very big either. But if they think that amphibians and reptiles will get ignored too much in the bigger group, then merging up to
Wikipedia:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles would give both the turtles group and the amphibians group a better chance at survival than leaving them separate.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:46, 17 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I don't think merging inactive projects is particularly useful though. When two dead wikiprojects are merged (with each other/or upstream) they don't increase community engagement. On other hand, to semi-active or even active WikiProjects will immediately see improved flows, if they're merged, with centralised talk discussions instead of fragmented discussions.
Some WikiProjects like
WP:TRUMP or
WP:OBAMA are best left dormant, until they become active again instead of attempting to shoehorn them into WP:USPOLITICS.
On other hand, something like WP:ISRAEL and WP:PALESTINE would be ripe for merger, but needs to be discussed with the communities first, on a common name etc.. ~ 🦝
Shushugah (he/him •
talk) 17:46, 19 January 2024 (UTC)reply
How are two different countries a valid candidate in your opinion? Would you say that WP:GERMANY and WP:AUSTRIA should also merge?
Gonnym (
talk) 22:10, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Merging small countries (as defined by the number of Wikipedia editors, not the actual population) up to regional areas or to whole continents might help all of them. A
WP:WikiProject German-speaking countries might be more successful and sustainable than separate groups for Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. When we have very few contributors, the groups fall apart.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 20:40, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
We used to have a very nice and active
Wikipedia:German-speaking Wikipedians' notice board (the talk page was where most of the action was). The Germany WikiProject has very nice article alerts, but is otherwise not very active these days. Given how massive its scope already is, merging it with other projects does not sound appealing to me, though. —
Kusma (
talk) 22:49, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Quite a few countries are covered as taskforces already. Many separate projects set up for a specific country are moribund. (Even the regional ones are moribund, but small steps.) Any discussion would be ad-hoc based on activity (or other en.wiki considerations), rather than being connected to any actual metric relating to the actual country.
CMD (
talk) 02:19, 23 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I think creating a WikiProject without making a
proposal should be a CSD criterion! There are so many created which will never get off the ground. A recent one to be reactivated was
Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra but that should really be part of Mathematics — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 13:31, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I agree here. While I also agree that merging inactive projects into their parent is better than leaving them, I really don't see any value in even that. Most of the inactive ones can really just be deleted which would save countless editorial hours in the many fixes that these pages receive (be it in templates, categories or lint fixes).
Gonnym (
talk) 22:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
A lot of functionality such as article alerts and large-scale quality surveys are built off WikiProject infrastructure. Deleting them means these are lost, whereas making them a task force maintains these potential functions to my understanding.
CMD (
talk) 00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, that's generally the case.
@
MSGJ, if you wanted to create rules around creating WikiProjects, I think that a more relevant standard would be requiring a certain number of editors (e.g., six editors, not counting brand-new accounts) to self-identify as participants. A WikiProject is a group of editors, and a set of pages without a group is not a WikiProject.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:42, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, exactly. I would say 10 ideally, but 6 would be a good minimum. — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 22:16, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
It's worse than I thought. On the same day Sahaib also created
Wikipedia:WikiProject Lanarkshire (again with only one participant). @
Sahaib: please stop, this is disruptive — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 09:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, these aren't helpful. Not everything needs a WikiProject (and in most cases, most really don't). Most don't even need a separate task force. While the idea of a task force is good, in practice, if there aren't enough participants it just doesn't do a good job. Use (in this case)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland and its talk page for anything that's needed for these pages.
Oh, I think everything benefits from a WikiProject – but a
WP:WikiProject is "a group of editors", not "one person". If there's only one person, there is no WikiProject.
@
Gonnym, the only reason that 99% of those pages are in that category is because nobody has volunteered to do the work to merge them up to non-defunct projects. Are you willing to work on that? These pages about Lanarkshire, for example, would get a proposal to join
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland, and you could put almost the entire list at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland#Specifically Scotland-related in the same merge proposal.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 22:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
No, I do not want to do work that I think is pointless. Every one of the projects listed there should be deleted.
Gonnym (
talk) 22:13, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
We don't normally delete a former group's pages because someone might try to
WP:REVIVE a group, and because it helps understand historical actions. It'd be like deleting an article's talk page, rather than archiving it, just because it's old and not being used right now.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Template {{
Is contentious}} detects if a given article is tagged as contentious, and is now available for use:
{{Is contentious|Transphobia}} → yes
{{Is contentious|Giraffe}} →
This should be useful to WikiProjects which have lists or tables of pages they might wish to tag, or to arrange in certain ways depending on article attributes. Further developments in this area are in progress.
Please report any issues with this template below, or at the Template Talk page. Thanks,
Mathglot (
talk) 21:48, 23 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Updating the proposal process
Back in the day,
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals was a more lively place, and if you wanted to start a group, then there were people watching it who might be interested in joining. Just
13 still-active editors are watching the page. Basically all the proposals fail, to the point that we stopped marking them as failed years ago. The typical proposer is a single individual, often less experienced than we might wish, with neither a group of editors nor any plan for finding and forming a group.
We have more conversations here about how to merge inactive and semi-active groups than how to start new groups or how to
WP:REVIVE existing groups. The most useful groups are large (100+ participants) and have a broad subject area ("plants", not "tulips"). We probably need something on the order of 20 very large groups, or 200 large and medium-sized groups. What we have is 2,000 mostly tiny and mostly inactive groups. Creating new groups can be a good idea (e.g.,
Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 four years ago) but it is almost always a waste of the creator's time.
Given all that, I'd like to know everyone's thoughts about the future of creating new groups. I'm looking for a gut feeling, not for anything carefully considered. For example, you could tell me where you fall in a spectrum that runs something like this:
Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the
Special:AbuseFilter.
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.
Feel free to write your own ideas.
(I do sometimes wonder whether we could get WMF grant money to pay an editor to systematically merge some of these WikiProjects up to larger groups. The technical work involved in merging the group's templates is not my idea of fun.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 23:51, 29 February 2024 (UTC)reply
I don’t think systematically merging WikiProjects is a good idea. If the WikiProject is dormant, it won’t become active by mixing with other dormant things and diluting the old focus of them all. I think WikiProject have mostly served their purpose, which was to coordinate editors during exponential growth periods.
Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the
Special:AbuseFilter?
I am averse to that language, “prohibit” and “endorse”. Can we instead take away (archive by blanking) the instructions on how to make a WikiProject?
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Like. Why six? I’d suggest seven. Seven is less likely to divide into ties.
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Yes. As above, do this by removing the instructions on how to do it
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
NNOOoooo. Newcomer enthusiasts do best when they creatively create, and then when you BITE them with speedy deletion of their good faith efforts, … that’s not how one grows a project.
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Yeah, let’s do that now. A new WikiProject needs a proposal and seven editors signing on, intending to participate.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.
It’s not like WikiProject creating is burning resources (storage, volunteer time) in large amounts, but we do know that the current list of proposals are very unlikely to achieve anything but the disappointment of the person trying. However, we’ve known this for a very long time, and would be a good thing to do something.
I don’t think systematically merging inactive WikiProjects is a good idea. But I do think systematically tagging and archiving them might be.
I think one of the factors that killed WikiProjects is the autotagging of new pages with WikiProject banners. For me, this is analogous of finding a former champion too tired to get out of bed, and force feeding them their old champion’s diet. If a WikiProject doesn’t have enough active volunteers to tag new pages of interest to the WikiProject, then it is time for the WikiProject to wind back its scope, not to have New Page Reviewers force feed new pages into it. This auto WikiProject banner addition removes the most basic job of WikiProject maintenance from its last casual maintainers, but chokes these last maintainers with too many new pages. Not only that, it also misinforms the new article writer that there are others who might care about their new article, when the WikiProject is defunct but some wheels are turning due to outsiders. I think defunct WikiProjects should be auto tagged defunct, and defunct WikiProjects should be unable to be tagged onto now pages, and maybe old tags should be removed. I think AfC and NPR volunteers should STOP applying WikiProject tags. I think there should be a rule: You may only apply a WikiProject tag if you are an active member of that WikiProject.
Mathematics is a rare active WikiProject. That merge would be good. I mean don’t merge things into an inactive WikiProject. Also, ask the WikiProject whether they want the stuff merged in, don’t just do it. Don’t do it unless they say yes. In fact, expect them to merge it in themselves. Are they active and interested, or not?
SmokeyJoe (
talk) 02:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply
We've got a process for merging WikiProjects, with a standard recommendation to wait at least a month for any objections. A completely defunct WikiProject won't object because nobody who cares about the group is still editing, so we don't necessarily want to require active agreement. To give an example, merging
Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra into
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics would require:
one editor thinking it's a good idea (good enough to inspire that editor to make the proposal),
Personally I'd fall closer to the high end of the spectrum, something closer to "prohibit or heavily limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support". Certainly one of the biggest problems with wikiprojects has been the constant creation of small limited-participation wikiprojects for topics of very narrow interest — the ones that are still relatively successful, like mathematics and film and music, are for broad subjects that encompass a lot of topics, while many of the underperforming ones are excessively narrow silos, like single-topic WikiProject One-Specific-Musician or WikiProject One-Specific-Actor playpens. But, alternatively, WikiProjects also have the ability to create task forces, which are still under the management of the overall wikiproject but allow editors to hone in on more specific topics of interest within it — but those, conversely, don't seem to be anywhere near as well-known, even though they would often suit the needs of new wikiproject creators better than a full-on wikiproject would. For instance, there aren't nearly enough active editors on the subject of Canadian film to justify or effectively maintain a full-on WikiProject Canadian Film — I'm not the only active editor on the subject, but it sure feels like I am sometimes — but as a task force within WikiProject Film, there's not nearly as much overhead required: it doesn't need its own dedicated templates and can be tagged for with a Canadian=y flag inside the existing parent project's templates; it doesn't need its own dedicated importance or quality rating infrastructure and can just use the parent project's assessment criteria. So as a WikiProject it would be unsustainable, but as a task force within a larger parent WikiProject it doesn't require as much sustenance in the first place — and as a task force, it also benefits from the ability to bring in outside eyes when needed, because sometimes all that's really needed is the eyes of people who edit on film in general. (Editors don't require any special expertise in Canadian film to know that the IP who keeps vandalizing
Nicole Dorsey's article with stuff about chocolate milk isn't adding anything of value, for example: you don't need a master's degree in Canadian film history to recognize that as inappropriate, and it can be watched out for by absolutely any responsible editor in the world so long as they know that Nicole Dorsey's article exists. So it's kind of the best of both worlds: the task force exists to be on top of identifying Nicole Dorsey as a film director who would qualify for an article, while the broader wikiproject as a whole can keep an eye out for the milk vandal.) So I'd be closer to the "stop or severely limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support" end of the spectrum — but what we can also do is better document the role and value of wikiproject task forces within larger parent wikiprojects as an alternative, and then allow the parent wikiprojects to monitor the creation and maintenance and mercy-killing of their task forces on their own. Task forces still shouldn't be created without being proposed first, but the parent wikiprojects should be the venue for their proposal and discussion — after all, WikiProject Music is in the best position to decide whether it needs a The Weeknd task force or not.
Bearcat (
talk) 14:53, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply
My experience with WPMED's task forces is that most were pointless, a few were active for a couple of years, and then they all fizzled out. I'm not sorry that we created them, and I do think that it's a valuable and frequently preferable alternative creating a completely separate group.
@
SmokeyJoe suggested archiving/blanking the instructions. I think closing down the proposals page could be part of that. We could replace it with a note saying that a WikiProject is a group, and unless you already have a sizable group, any pages you create need to be in your userspace.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Yep, support that — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:55, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
In my opinion, there is hardly a reason to create new WikiProjects and they require unique cases (such as Covid). Anything worthwhile for a project was already created - countries, sports, media, etc. Any new project created is usually DoA and I don't see any bright future for Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound. Additionally, these create a ton of maintenance issues that these creators either don't know or don't care about in templates, categories, lint errors and other places. Even merging dead WikiProjects is pointless. Everything other than the main page and its talk page should be deleted and marked as historical and the rest deleted. In the TV project we have many dead task forces that don't do anything other than collecting dust (
Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Fawlty Towers task force a task force for a 12 episode series, or
Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Awake task force for a similar amount). Even task forces should be about a broad subject that actually needs collaboration that a simple talk page can't handle.
Gonnym (
talk) 07:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I have less of a problem with new task forces being created within existing projects. But we could perhaps streamline the process of marking them as inactive so they don't clutter the banner — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The fact that they are still in the banner is something I have an issue with. Look how long the code and /doc of
Template:WikiProject Television is when most of its task forces are dead. At some point we need to recognize that we should be serving our active editors and not some false historic sentiment.
Gonnym (
talk) 13:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I think it should be suggested that after finding a sizeable group of interested editors, they should consider finding the best matching parent WikiProject that still has some activity, and try holding their discussions there. If there's enough overlap in interests amongst the groups, then both of them can benefit.
isaacl (
talk) 07:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes that is also good advice, although the parent project may not be clear cut in all cases — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:49, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Interdisciplinary subjects are a problem for finding a "parent", but I think that's manageable. People can always ask for help here.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 17:24, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The interested parties can choose any one they prefer, and as deemed necessary, provide pointers on other project discussion pages to discussions on the page where they are collaborating.
isaacl (
talk) 16:29, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Reject/archive most of the old proposals listed on that page. The ones from February and March should probably be allowed to run their course, but the rest are likely old enough to be stale.
I have set up
Category:decade overviews as a set of categories, as well as articles, and navboxes, as part of
WikiProject History Contemporary History task force, which I chair.
Please feel free to contact me any time, with any comments, ideas or questions. thanks! --
Sm8900 (
talk) 14:39, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Looks useful. How is it supposed to work exactly - for example is
1870s in film supposed to be in
Category:1870s decade overviews? Is there any effort to populate all these categories? — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 14:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
hi @
MSGJ. that is an excellent question. actually, it is meant to be used for articles that are themselves an overview for an entire decade. so therefore if a category pertains to a decade, but the articles within it are only for specific years, then no, that category would not be included there. thanks.
please feel free to comment further or at length, if you want. thanks!!
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:03, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
ok. i see that
1870s in film is indeed an article covering an entire decade. so based upon that, yes, it could go in the decade overviews category. I'm open to any feedback of course on this. thanks!
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:04, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
@
MSGJ; yes, ok. that's a quesiton of nomenclature which we should probably resolve now. down the road in the 22nd century, they may thank us!! :)
ok, so you favor
Category:20th-century overviews, as the name format for this set of categories?
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:21, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
This page relates to the WikiProject Council, a collaborative effort regarding
WikiProjects in general. If you would like to participate, please visit the
project discussion page.CouncilWikipedia:WikiProject CouncilTemplate:WikiProject CouncilCouncil articles
A1: A WikiProject is a group of people who want to work together. It is not a subject area, a collection of pages, or a list of articles
tagged by the group.
A3: Nobody knows, because not all participants add their names to a membership list, and membership lists are almost always out of date. You can find out which projects' main pages are being watched by the most users at
Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers.
Q4: Which WikiProject has tagged the most articles as being within their scope?
A4:WikiProject Biography has tagged about 2.05 million articles, which is more than three times the size of the second largest number of pages tagged by a WikiProject. About ten groups have tagged more than 100,000 articles. You can see a list of projects and the number of articles they have assessed
here.
Q5: Who gets to decide whether a WikiProject is permitted to tag an article?
A5: That is the exclusive right of the participants of the WikiProject. Editors at an article may neither force the group to tag an article nor refuse to permit them to tag an article. See
WP:PROJGUIDE#OWN.
Q6: I think a couple of WikiProjects should be merged. Is that okay?
A6: You must ask the people who belong to those groups, even if the groups appear to be inactive. It's okay for different groups of people to be working on similar articles. WikiProjects are people, not lists of articles. If you identify and explain clear, practical benefits of a merger to all of the affected groups, they are likely to agree to combining into a larger group. However, if they object, then you may not merge the pages. For less-active groups, you may need to wait a month or more to make sure that no one objects.
Q7: I want to start a WikiProject. Am I required to advertise it at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals and/or have a specific number of editors support it?
A7: No, there are no requirements. However, new WikiProjects, especially new groups that are proposed by new editors, rarely remain active for longer than a few months unless there are at least six or eight active editors involved at the time of creation.
@
SMcCandlish, thanks for this note. I'm sorry I didn't see it until now. There's a (non-RM) process for merging WikiProjects that respects the fact that WikiProjects are groups of people, rather than groups of pages, and that sometimes a division is due to human reasons (e.g., personality conflict).
I do agree with the sentiment that many WikiProjects need to be merged up to bigger groups. One could imagine, e.g., this wine group as well as
Wikipedia:WikiProject Beer becoming part of the more generic
Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Beverages Task Force. The problem is that this process takes a couple of hours per full merge, and nobody wants to do that systematically.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 19:05, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
Well, there should never be a wikiproject split (or failure of one to merge that needs to merge) on the basis of two editors having a personality conflict. That would be a
WP:PROJECTFORK. If two editors have an issue with each other, they need
dispute resolution, or for one or both of them to simply withdraw from the topic area if the dispute remains intractable after DR attempts. A merge of two projects into one might take a few hours, but is not all that big a deal. It's not like merging hundreds of articles or something. —
SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 20:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
A WikiProject is not a process of any sort, so it won't ever fall under the heading of ==Process forks==.
Are you volunteering to merge up WikiProjects? I think I could literally keep you busy for a thousand hours with that, if you're willing. The first one or two are the hardest, but after you've done it a few times, it does get faster. You've already got the template editor user right, which will help with the banners.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:25, 29 November 2023 (UTC)reply
I would be down to help, if I had a list of the most wanted/relevant WikiProjects for merger. I'd rather merge two active/semi-active projects than bother with defunct projects. I'd also love to read documentation somewhere of what needs merging. Asides from archives of past discussions, categories for the different importance/quality categories...anything else? ~ 🦝
Shushugah (he/him •
talk) 00:50, 17 January 2024 (UTC)reply
The usual thing is to merge a defunct or barely active WikiProject into an active one. Some examples include:
See
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces for a checklist. These pages don't necessarily need to be converted to task forces (=separate sub-pages), but it should give you an idea of what needs to be covered. Off hand, there's moving or redirecting all the pages+sub-pages, the talk-page banner itself (e.g.,
Template:WikiProject Capitalism), the cats produced by the banner, any userboxes or special barnstars the group made, and any cats produced by the userboxes. But the first step is to find a group that seems to be too small and another group they could merge into, and asking them if they are willing to have the groups merged. Like trying to merge groups of kids in school, if they don't want to play together, we can't really make them, but most are willing.
On the size of the groups: I don't think I'd recommend small steps. For example, if everyone is willing, it's probably better to jump straight from "Turtles" up to "Animals", because the "Animals" group isn't very big either. But if they think that amphibians and reptiles will get ignored too much in the bigger group, then merging up to
Wikipedia:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles would give both the turtles group and the amphibians group a better chance at survival than leaving them separate.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:46, 17 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I don't think merging inactive projects is particularly useful though. When two dead wikiprojects are merged (with each other/or upstream) they don't increase community engagement. On other hand, to semi-active or even active WikiProjects will immediately see improved flows, if they're merged, with centralised talk discussions instead of fragmented discussions.
Some WikiProjects like
WP:TRUMP or
WP:OBAMA are best left dormant, until they become active again instead of attempting to shoehorn them into WP:USPOLITICS.
On other hand, something like WP:ISRAEL and WP:PALESTINE would be ripe for merger, but needs to be discussed with the communities first, on a common name etc.. ~ 🦝
Shushugah (he/him •
talk) 17:46, 19 January 2024 (UTC)reply
How are two different countries a valid candidate in your opinion? Would you say that WP:GERMANY and WP:AUSTRIA should also merge?
Gonnym (
talk) 22:10, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Merging small countries (as defined by the number of Wikipedia editors, not the actual population) up to regional areas or to whole continents might help all of them. A
WP:WikiProject German-speaking countries might be more successful and sustainable than separate groups for Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. When we have very few contributors, the groups fall apart.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 20:40, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
We used to have a very nice and active
Wikipedia:German-speaking Wikipedians' notice board (the talk page was where most of the action was). The Germany WikiProject has very nice article alerts, but is otherwise not very active these days. Given how massive its scope already is, merging it with other projects does not sound appealing to me, though. —
Kusma (
talk) 22:49, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Quite a few countries are covered as taskforces already. Many separate projects set up for a specific country are moribund. (Even the regional ones are moribund, but small steps.) Any discussion would be ad-hoc based on activity (or other en.wiki considerations), rather than being connected to any actual metric relating to the actual country.
CMD (
talk) 02:19, 23 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I think creating a WikiProject without making a
proposal should be a CSD criterion! There are so many created which will never get off the ground. A recent one to be reactivated was
Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra but that should really be part of Mathematics — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 13:31, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
I agree here. While I also agree that merging inactive projects into their parent is better than leaving them, I really don't see any value in even that. Most of the inactive ones can really just be deleted which would save countless editorial hours in the many fixes that these pages receive (be it in templates, categories or lint fixes).
Gonnym (
talk) 22:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)reply
A lot of functionality such as article alerts and large-scale quality surveys are built off WikiProject infrastructure. Deleting them means these are lost, whereas making them a task force maintains these potential functions to my understanding.
CMD (
talk) 00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, that's generally the case.
@
MSGJ, if you wanted to create rules around creating WikiProjects, I think that a more relevant standard would be requiring a certain number of editors (e.g., six editors, not counting brand-new accounts) to self-identify as participants. A WikiProject is a group of editors, and a set of pages without a group is not a WikiProject.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 21:42, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, exactly. I would say 10 ideally, but 6 would be a good minimum. — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 22:16, 22 January 2024 (UTC)reply
It's worse than I thought. On the same day Sahaib also created
Wikipedia:WikiProject Lanarkshire (again with only one participant). @
Sahaib: please stop, this is disruptive — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 09:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, these aren't helpful. Not everything needs a WikiProject (and in most cases, most really don't). Most don't even need a separate task force. While the idea of a task force is good, in practice, if there aren't enough participants it just doesn't do a good job. Use (in this case)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland and its talk page for anything that's needed for these pages.
Oh, I think everything benefits from a WikiProject – but a
WP:WikiProject is "a group of editors", not "one person". If there's only one person, there is no WikiProject.
@
Gonnym, the only reason that 99% of those pages are in that category is because nobody has volunteered to do the work to merge them up to non-defunct projects. Are you willing to work on that? These pages about Lanarkshire, for example, would get a proposal to join
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland, and you could put almost the entire list at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland#Specifically Scotland-related in the same merge proposal.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 22:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
No, I do not want to do work that I think is pointless. Every one of the projects listed there should be deleted.
Gonnym (
talk) 22:13, 5 February 2024 (UTC)reply
We don't normally delete a former group's pages because someone might try to
WP:REVIVE a group, and because it helps understand historical actions. It'd be like deleting an article's talk page, rather than archiving it, just because it's old and not being used right now.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Template {{
Is contentious}} detects if a given article is tagged as contentious, and is now available for use:
{{Is contentious|Transphobia}} → yes
{{Is contentious|Giraffe}} →
This should be useful to WikiProjects which have lists or tables of pages they might wish to tag, or to arrange in certain ways depending on article attributes. Further developments in this area are in progress.
Please report any issues with this template below, or at the Template Talk page. Thanks,
Mathglot (
talk) 21:48, 23 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Updating the proposal process
Back in the day,
Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals was a more lively place, and if you wanted to start a group, then there were people watching it who might be interested in joining. Just
13 still-active editors are watching the page. Basically all the proposals fail, to the point that we stopped marking them as failed years ago. The typical proposer is a single individual, often less experienced than we might wish, with neither a group of editors nor any plan for finding and forming a group.
We have more conversations here about how to merge inactive and semi-active groups than how to start new groups or how to
WP:REVIVE existing groups. The most useful groups are large (100+ participants) and have a broad subject area ("plants", not "tulips"). We probably need something on the order of 20 very large groups, or 200 large and medium-sized groups. What we have is 2,000 mostly tiny and mostly inactive groups. Creating new groups can be a good idea (e.g.,
Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 four years ago) but it is almost always a waste of the creator's time.
Given all that, I'd like to know everyone's thoughts about the future of creating new groups. I'm looking for a gut feeling, not for anything carefully considered. For example, you could tell me where you fall in a spectrum that runs something like this:
Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the
Special:AbuseFilter.
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.
Feel free to write your own ideas.
(I do sometimes wonder whether we could get WMF grant money to pay an editor to systematically merge some of these WikiProjects up to larger groups. The technical work involved in merging the group's templates is not my idea of fun.)
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 23:51, 29 February 2024 (UTC)reply
I don’t think systematically merging WikiProjects is a good idea. If the WikiProject is dormant, it won’t become active by mixing with other dormant things and diluting the old focus of them all. I think WikiProject have mostly served their purpose, which was to coordinate editors during exponential growth periods.
Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the
Special:AbuseFilter?
I am averse to that language, “prohibit” and “endorse”. Can we instead take away (archive by blanking) the instructions on how to make a WikiProject?
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Like. Why six? I’d suggest seven. Seven is less likely to divide into ties.
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Yes. As above, do this by removing the instructions on how to do it
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
NNOOoooo. Newcomer enthusiasts do best when they creatively create, and then when you BITE them with speedy deletion of their good faith efforts, … that’s not how one grows a project.
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Yeah, let’s do that now. A new WikiProject needs a proposal and seven editors signing on, intending to participate.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.
It’s not like WikiProject creating is burning resources (storage, volunteer time) in large amounts, but we do know that the current list of proposals are very unlikely to achieve anything but the disappointment of the person trying. However, we’ve known this for a very long time, and would be a good thing to do something.
I don’t think systematically merging inactive WikiProjects is a good idea. But I do think systematically tagging and archiving them might be.
I think one of the factors that killed WikiProjects is the autotagging of new pages with WikiProject banners. For me, this is analogous of finding a former champion too tired to get out of bed, and force feeding them their old champion’s diet. If a WikiProject doesn’t have enough active volunteers to tag new pages of interest to the WikiProject, then it is time for the WikiProject to wind back its scope, not to have New Page Reviewers force feed new pages into it. This auto WikiProject banner addition removes the most basic job of WikiProject maintenance from its last casual maintainers, but chokes these last maintainers with too many new pages. Not only that, it also misinforms the new article writer that there are others who might care about their new article, when the WikiProject is defunct but some wheels are turning due to outsiders. I think defunct WikiProjects should be auto tagged defunct, and defunct WikiProjects should be unable to be tagged onto now pages, and maybe old tags should be removed. I think AfC and NPR volunteers should STOP applying WikiProject tags. I think there should be a rule: You may only apply a WikiProject tag if you are an active member of that WikiProject.
Mathematics is a rare active WikiProject. That merge would be good. I mean don’t merge things into an inactive WikiProject. Also, ask the WikiProject whether they want the stuff merged in, don’t just do it. Don’t do it unless they say yes. In fact, expect them to merge it in themselves. Are they active and interested, or not?
SmokeyJoe (
talk) 02:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply
We've got a process for merging WikiProjects, with a standard recommendation to wait at least a month for any objections. A completely defunct WikiProject won't object because nobody who cares about the group is still editing, so we don't necessarily want to require active agreement. To give an example, merging
Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra into
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics would require:
one editor thinking it's a good idea (good enough to inspire that editor to make the proposal),
Personally I'd fall closer to the high end of the spectrum, something closer to "prohibit or heavily limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support". Certainly one of the biggest problems with wikiprojects has been the constant creation of small limited-participation wikiprojects for topics of very narrow interest — the ones that are still relatively successful, like mathematics and film and music, are for broad subjects that encompass a lot of topics, while many of the underperforming ones are excessively narrow silos, like single-topic WikiProject One-Specific-Musician or WikiProject One-Specific-Actor playpens. But, alternatively, WikiProjects also have the ability to create task forces, which are still under the management of the overall wikiproject but allow editors to hone in on more specific topics of interest within it — but those, conversely, don't seem to be anywhere near as well-known, even though they would often suit the needs of new wikiproject creators better than a full-on wikiproject would. For instance, there aren't nearly enough active editors on the subject of Canadian film to justify or effectively maintain a full-on WikiProject Canadian Film — I'm not the only active editor on the subject, but it sure feels like I am sometimes — but as a task force within WikiProject Film, there's not nearly as much overhead required: it doesn't need its own dedicated templates and can be tagged for with a Canadian=y flag inside the existing parent project's templates; it doesn't need its own dedicated importance or quality rating infrastructure and can just use the parent project's assessment criteria. So as a WikiProject it would be unsustainable, but as a task force within a larger parent WikiProject it doesn't require as much sustenance in the first place — and as a task force, it also benefits from the ability to bring in outside eyes when needed, because sometimes all that's really needed is the eyes of people who edit on film in general. (Editors don't require any special expertise in Canadian film to know that the IP who keeps vandalizing
Nicole Dorsey's article with stuff about chocolate milk isn't adding anything of value, for example: you don't need a master's degree in Canadian film history to recognize that as inappropriate, and it can be watched out for by absolutely any responsible editor in the world so long as they know that Nicole Dorsey's article exists. So it's kind of the best of both worlds: the task force exists to be on top of identifying Nicole Dorsey as a film director who would qualify for an article, while the broader wikiproject as a whole can keep an eye out for the milk vandal.) So I'd be closer to the "stop or severely limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support" end of the spectrum — but what we can also do is better document the role and value of wikiproject task forces within larger parent wikiprojects as an alternative, and then allow the parent wikiprojects to monitor the creation and maintenance and mercy-killing of their task forces on their own. Task forces still shouldn't be created without being proposed first, but the parent wikiprojects should be the venue for their proposal and discussion — after all, WikiProject Music is in the best position to decide whether it needs a The Weeknd task force or not.
Bearcat (
talk) 14:53, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply
My experience with WPMED's task forces is that most were pointless, a few were active for a couple of years, and then they all fizzled out. I'm not sorry that we created them, and I do think that it's a valuable and frequently preferable alternative creating a completely separate group.
@
SmokeyJoe suggested archiving/blanking the instructions. I think closing down the proposals page could be part of that. We could replace it with a note saying that a WikiProject is a group, and unless you already have a sizable group, any pages you create need to be in your userspace.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 01:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Yep, support that — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:55, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
In my opinion, there is hardly a reason to create new WikiProjects and they require unique cases (such as Covid). Anything worthwhile for a project was already created - countries, sports, media, etc. Any new project created is usually DoA and I don't see any bright future for Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound. Additionally, these create a ton of maintenance issues that these creators either don't know or don't care about in templates, categories, lint errors and other places. Even merging dead WikiProjects is pointless. Everything other than the main page and its talk page should be deleted and marked as historical and the rest deleted. In the TV project we have many dead task forces that don't do anything other than collecting dust (
Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Fawlty Towers task force a task force for a 12 episode series, or
Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Awake task force for a similar amount). Even task forces should be about a broad subject that actually needs collaboration that a simple talk page can't handle.
Gonnym (
talk) 07:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I have less of a problem with new task forces being created within existing projects. But we could perhaps streamline the process of marking them as inactive so they don't clutter the banner — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The fact that they are still in the banner is something I have an issue with. Look how long the code and /doc of
Template:WikiProject Television is when most of its task forces are dead. At some point we need to recognize that we should be serving our active editors and not some false historic sentiment.
Gonnym (
talk) 13:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I think it should be suggested that after finding a sizeable group of interested editors, they should consider finding the best matching parent WikiProject that still has some activity, and try holding their discussions there. If there's enough overlap in interests amongst the groups, then both of them can benefit.
isaacl (
talk) 07:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes that is also good advice, although the parent project may not be clear cut in all cases — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 11:49, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Interdisciplinary subjects are a problem for finding a "parent", but I think that's manageable. People can always ask for help here.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 17:24, 15 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The interested parties can choose any one they prefer, and as deemed necessary, provide pointers on other project discussion pages to discussions on the page where they are collaborating.
isaacl (
talk) 16:29, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Reject/archive most of the old proposals listed on that page. The ones from February and March should probably be allowed to run their course, but the rest are likely old enough to be stale.
I have set up
Category:decade overviews as a set of categories, as well as articles, and navboxes, as part of
WikiProject History Contemporary History task force, which I chair.
Please feel free to contact me any time, with any comments, ideas or questions. thanks! --
Sm8900 (
talk) 14:39, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Looks useful. How is it supposed to work exactly - for example is
1870s in film supposed to be in
Category:1870s decade overviews? Is there any effort to populate all these categories? — Martin (
MSGJ ·
talk) 14:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
hi @
MSGJ. that is an excellent question. actually, it is meant to be used for articles that are themselves an overview for an entire decade. so therefore if a category pertains to a decade, but the articles within it are only for specific years, then no, that category would not be included there. thanks.
please feel free to comment further or at length, if you want. thanks!!
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:03, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
ok. i see that
1870s in film is indeed an article covering an entire decade. so based upon that, yes, it could go in the decade overviews category. I'm open to any feedback of course on this. thanks!
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:04, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply
@
MSGJ; yes, ok. that's a quesiton of nomenclature which we should probably resolve now. down the road in the 22nd century, they may thank us!! :)
ok, so you favor
Category:20th-century overviews, as the name format for this set of categories?
Sm8900 (
talk) 15:21, 18 March 2024 (UTC)reply