Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team

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Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Work via WikiProjects discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions


Contents

[edit] Archives


[edit] Next release version

Martin, aka Walkerma, set up a page similar to the 0.5 nominations to start nominations for the next release version. Sorry, but I suspended that.

I think we ought to evaluate, see what we've learned and discuss things first.

A few things I've seen:

  1. Some people get upset when their nomination is not approved.
  2. The current set of 0.5 articles is not very balanced.
  3. The standards are somewhat vague, which has good and bad points.

Here is my idea of a general plan for the next version:

  1. At least generally require only one approval, similar to 0.5.
  2. Keep a page for disputes.
  3. The release would have two sections, a "cyclopedia" and a "showcase."
    1. FAs would be included in the showcase unless there is a compelling reason otherwise, that including the article would embarrass us. In other words, I think it's unlikely that we'd exclude any.
    2. Use importance as the main criteria for the cyclopedia. Work fromWikipedia:Core topics - 1,000, Wikipedia:Vital articles or something similar, which would form the list of automatic nominations. Of course, those lists can be improved anytime.
      1. The list could be handled somewhat like the FA Review page has been handled for 0.5. But the articles whose quality is not up to par need not be removed from the list, but just noted, hopefully to encourage people to work on them. Maurreen 18:27, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I was wrote the post below, and posted it before seeing this. It sounds like we are pretty much in agreement on everything! Great! I hope we can improve the balance at 0.5 during this month, though it won't be fixed by Sept 30. Walkerma 15:29, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Version 0.5 Nominations now closed, what's next?

Since we are now definitely past August 31 in all time zones, I closed nominations for Version 0.5. Articles already nominated but not yet reviewed should be reviewed during September (please help!). Since we already have dozens of solicitations out there for nominations, I have created a generic page for nominations here, so that people have somewhere to place their suggestions for the time being until we decide what version comes next. When we agree on the next release we can copy and paste this page over, and have the page disabled by ready to use for the version AFTER that when it's needed again.

As I mentioned above, my life is about to get very busy, so I won't be able to take the lead on the next Release Version, but I will still be able to help out with reviews etc.

  • Should we have another version?
I'd say that now the train is moving, we don't want to stop it or we may never get it going again! Walkerma 18:45, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • What version should come next?
I'd suggest Version 0.7, and aim for a close of nominations in January 2007. Focus on importance, make sure we have all the VAs, any core topics/supplement/core biographies that missed 0.5, etc. Roll over all of Version 0.5, and try for about 3000 articles total. Walkerma 18:45, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Should we use the same system next time as for V0.5?
For test (pre-1.0) versions I'd say yes, in general, but try to nominated groups of articles, and use the FA review page as a model - that seemed to be more productive. Walkerma 18:46, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • What about for Release Version 1.0 itself, our first major release?
For Version 1.0 itself, I'd like to propose a radical change - use the WikiProject assessments to automatically include articles. We now have over 70,000 articles assessed - almost 50,000 in the last month alone - let's use those data! If we decide criteria carefully, after ranking WikiProjects in terms of levels of priority/importance for WP1.0, we can simply include ALL articles from certain categories quality/importance. We should use stable versions only where these are available (this will probably come on line later this year). We MUST have a system that can scale to tens of thousands of articles, and I think an approach like this is needed - we can't realistically review 30,000 articles ourselves (and anyway, the WikiProject assessments are by subject experts). We will have to do some "reality checks" - some projects tend to be more lenient with the grading than others - but I think we will have to move in that direction. Walkerma 18:46, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Who will coordinate Version 0.7?
YOUR NAME HERE?
Eyu100 04:44, 24 September 2006 (UTC) (possibly)

Any other thoughts or suggestions? We can also discuss some of these issues on IRC tonight or on Sunday (see details further up this page), and we can schedule more IRC discussions as needed for weekends after that. Walkerma 18:45, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Future versions, editions, continued

OK, it seems like Martin and I agree in general principle on the procedures for the next edition.

As to when to start that -- I think we should hold off until at least we have few nominations left to check. Otherwise it would diffuse energy, take away time from 0.5. For example, there are more than 100 nominations at the main 0.5 nomination page that have not been reviewed.

As to 1.0, I'd prefer that we figure that out at least after we are done with 0.5. For one thing, that would give us more opportunity to learn from the experience of 0.5. Maurreen 17:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Next IRC meeting on Sunday

We will be holding another IRC meeting on Sunday September 10th at 4pm EST, 20:00 UTC, on #wikipedia-static. Please sign up here if you plan to attend, and suggest any agenda items you would like to cover.

Attendees
  1. Walkerma 21:35, 6 September 2006 (UTC) I must apologise - I may have to leave after an hour, but hopefully we can cover most of the agenda in an hour.
  2. NCurse work 21:40, 6 September 2006 (UTC) (Probably)
  1. Maybe next time. I unfortunately can't be there. NCurse work 18:29, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
  1. Titoxd(?!?) 05:48, 7 September 2006 (UTC) (still uncertain, depends on RL busy-ness)
  2. Kirill Lokshin 16:37, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
  3. Dna-Dennis talk - contribs 16:08, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
  4. Kelson 11:13, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
  5. Jleybov 18:58, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
  6. Maurreen 16:43, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
Suggested agenda items
  1. Progress on a publisher for Version 0.5 (if any) Walkerma
  2. "Front-end" software - any new ideas? Walkerma
  3. What should come after version 0.5? (Other views besides mine!) Walkerma

[edit] Non-article featured content

How does a "featured list" get recorded, e.g., Timeline of discovery of solar system planets and their natural satellites? Rfrisbietalk 20:05, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I've seen those tagged as FA-Class before, but I don't know if that's general practice throughout. Kirill Lokshin 20:15, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Personally I tag an FL as FA-class, and anything else as NA, just because it's hard for a generalist to assess quality & completeness of a list like List of rivers by length. However, lists and the like are often extremely valuable as navigation tools and IMHO we need to make sure all relevant ones are included in offline releases. For all set nominations I have always nominated the appropriate list, too. For that purpose the quality (FL or not FL) is less important in an offline release than relevance - for example, the list of rivers is extremely relevant to help find the rivers we have listed (if these are approved). Walkerma 20:30, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
You can tag portals and images as FA, as pages don't get picked up by the bot anyways if they're not in the main namespace. (We use that in WP:WPTC.) Titoxd(?!?) 03:20, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Just wondering

Why do we need it on a CD/DVD if we already have it on the internet? And would if someone accidentally puts an srticle with false information on the disc, and some kid uses it for a school project? My guess is that you guys would get sued. Sorry, I'm just not that sure it will sell good. XD375 12:49, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

The German DVD proved to be popular, and we have every reason to believe that other languages will turn out the same. Not everyone in the world has a high-speed internet connection on their laps 24 hours a day. Much of the world doesn't even have electricity! As for false info: (a) We expect it to have much less of this than the online version, as every article has been at least looked at and (b) We will of course have necessary disclaimers, and I don't foresee litigation over high school projects (or Britannica would be bankrupt by now!). As long as the kid cites his/her source, they should be OK, and so should we. There have been zero lawsuits since the first DVD came out in Germany in 2004. Walkerma 15:56, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
To which I will add: a CD/DVD is much harder to vandalize. Many people who do not want their kids going anywhere near most of the Internet, Wikipedia included, would have no problem with giving them access to certain large bodies of our content on a CD/DVD. - Jmabel | Talk 00:47, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Next meeting

There will be another IRC meeting on Saturday September 30th at 3pm PDT (UTC-7) on #wikipedia-static. Please sign up here if you plan to attend, and suggest any agenda items you would like to cover.

Attendees
Eyu100 04:49, 24 September 2006 (UTC) (possibly, not sure)
Walkerma 15:58, 25 September 2006 (UTC) (maybe only part time, depending on family commitments)
Topics
  1. Tasks remaining before Version 0.5 can be published.
  2. Thoughts on Version 0.7 or whatever comes next.

[edit] Interesting link

For history versioning, something that can be really useful is this tool. It gives a statistical overview of an article's history, which may be useful, instead of providing the full editing history of an included article. Titoxd(?!?) 02:49, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Looks excellent! Better than the list you get from "cite this article" and much more convenient! Thanks, Walkerma 03:55, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] So what is Wikipedia all about, anyway?

Hi, I am not a member, just dropped by to ask a question. I see from the Wikipedia:Signpost that your group has examined 100,000 Wikipedia articles. Were they randomly chosen? If so (or even if not), do you happen to have kept any count by subject area? E.g. how many are on science topics, history topics, bands, schools, localities, businesses? Even better would be a table correlating ratings with topics.---CH 02:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

The main index (in particular, the "statistics" pages linked there) give a breakdown by each participating WikiProject, which should be suitable for rough estimates by corresponding subject area. Hope that helps! Kirill Lokshin 02:58, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
The Signpost piece is slightly misleading - the team itself didn't assess 100k articles (or we'd be very tired by this point!), we merely coordinated the assessment by WikiProjects. I wouldn't know how to assess the quality of an article on some aspect of The KLF but a member of the project will. The topics assessed so far depend on which projects have signed up - for example Chemistry has signed up, but the Dance WikiProject has not - but we hope in time to see nearly all projects participating, with articles from all corners of Wikipedia represented. Oh, and we're now up to 130k articles! Walkerma 15:27, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Size of CD / DVD

Folks, I had some time to put together a method for producing an HTML tree of these articles. I have made a page at User:Wikiwizzy/CDTools that describes it. Some assembly required, and too many hardcoded paths in the scripts..

This would enable other people to create CDs of specialised content, like military history or mathematics, and update the CD from recent XML dumps. I have no method for selective excising of sections yet, that BozMo needs for his CD.

Wizzy…☎ 21:34, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

is there going to be a way to click on something that leads to the live version for an updated look/edit? JoeSmack Talk(p-review!) 22:24, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Not currently. Will see what it takes. Wizzy…☎
Thanks Wizzy! We really need people like you who can handle this sort of thing, I'm clueless I'm afraid! We will need to submit Version 0.5 to this process in about a month or so, can we borrow your scripts? Are some of your scripts the same as BozMo's? Is the tree the same as his? If not, where does it differ? Some comments:
You may certainly use my scripts. I asked BozMo for his scripts a while back, but he said they were not freely distributable. Mine are. Wizzy…☎
  1. Do we have to remove references, inline or otherwise? I would have thought we would want to keep all that information. I'd say we would want them for Version 0.5, certainly. By all means remove external links and inter-language links.
    I will leave the refs in. Wizzy…☎
  2. I'd suggest removing any cleanup and "Citation Needed" tags as unhelpful - you can't clean up static content! Neutrality and related tags are more debatable, I could go either way with those.
  3. I'd like to see us run an anti-vandal bot on the articles to screen out bad language, "David is gay" and other erudite comments. No need to write a separate script IMHO, there are already bots out there that have been honed for this purpose.
  4. I'd like to see us incorporate metadata on articles if this is possible; Version 0.5 that might only involve the assessment (eg to say that an article is FA standard, or only a Start-Class). This is included in the same talk page template that generates the Version 0.5 list, categories such as Category:FA-Class Version 0.5 articles. If this is impossible, we can manage without it.
    Currently the XML dumps I download do not include discussion pages. My goal is to make all this completely automatic - there is no way I am hand-editing any of this stuff. Wizzy…☎
  5. In terms of organization, all Version 0.5 articles are organized into 11 top-level categories (the Misc category is very small though), as listed at {{V0.5}}. These also get generated by the talk-page template into categories like Category:Natural sciences Version 0.5 articles. Can the script manage that?
    If it is accessible from the main XML dump, particularly categories, it can be done. Wizzy…☎
  6. The last point highlights another issue we face - organisation of content. That means redirects, lists, etc. That may be separate from the tree, but if you know of scripts that can (for example) find all the redirects to a given article and adds them to the listing, that could be very useful.
    Not yet. Wizzy…☎
  7. Should we have an IRC discussion (Sunday 22nd?) with Wizzy, BozMo, Walkerma, and others who want to join in? Polimerik from pl might give us some insights and share some of the Polish scripts.
  8. You should probably raise this at m:Talk:Special projects subcommittees/Static content as well. Don't be concerned that no one responds immediately (they won't), I'll try and solicit comments when I can via emails and foreign language user talk pages.
I must say I was very pleased to see your posting. Many thanks, Walkerma 05:09, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Great!

  1. The front page should be our Version 0.5 main page.
  2. References should stay in the articles (maybe the most important part of the project)
  3. Templates shouldn't stay as they're linking to articles which don't exist in our Version.
  4. Pictures really should stay...

NCurse work 05:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Something that would help me greatly would be a mailed hard drive with all XML dumps and pictures from a particular date. It is impossible for me (in South Africa) to get these in a reasonable time, and I pay for bandwidth. I will pay for the disk.. Wizzy…☎ 10:38, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Do you need an actual hard drive, or would a DVD of the articles suffice? Walkerma 17:53, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
A DVD would be fine. However, the picture dump runs about 100Gig these days - well beyond a DVD. I have the article dump from August - 1.3Gig - I just need a matching picture dump. If you send a newer picture dump, it would be great to send the corresponding article dump. If you cut down the picture dump to our article list, you have done most of the work for 0.5 already :-) These things are big. Wizzy…☎ 12:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
There is always Blu-Ray, but not many people even have a blu-ray player... Nominaladversary 12:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Search

The categories mentioned on the Version 0.5 main page are not main Wikipedia categories, and thus will need hand-sorting. What it really needs is a search. I have been looking at ksearch-client-side, a javascript search engine that runs in the browser. It is a javascript program that holds the search db itself - one-line summaries of the articles, and an inverted tree matching words back to articles. With some tweaking (cutting all articles to 3K, so it searches the lead paragraph only) I have reduced the javascript to a 'mere' 4Meg - still a bit big, but search is great.. It works fine in Opera, but Firefox only searches text up into the Ls - nothing later in the alphabet. It stops on the word length - if I move it earlier, it still stops there, if I rename or delete it everything works.. weird..

A search capability would definitely be a great help. I had assumed that we could lift the search from Wikipedia (or a dumbed-down version of it) and use it offline - but you seem to imply this is not the case. Can you confirm this? Walkerma 17:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The search in wikipedia relies on a webserver and a database, neither of which is present on a CD/DVD. Basically, it needs a computer. The only computer around is the one running the browser, and the only language we can use is javascript. ksearch-client-side does what we need, quite well, actually. The only downside is its memory requirements - I have it down to 2.8 Meg.
If you want to try out this search on BozMo's CD, follow instructions at User:Wikiwizzy/CDTools. Wizzy…☎ 19:40, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
What is a tgz file? I've never heard of that, and my computer can't seem to unpack it. Is it possible to put it up uncompressed, or would that take ages on your line? Walkerma 19:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Ungzipped. See ftp://ftp.wizzy.com/pub/wizzy/CDTools/ Wizzy…☎ 00:32, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your work here, but it seems I need a UNIX machine to run a tar file, don't I? My Windows XP machine doesn't know what to do with it! Any suggestions? Thanks, Walkerma 03:03, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Winzip will read tar files (and tgz files). Wizzy…☎ 07:56, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

The categories on the 0.5 page were someone's experiment, we will be using the 10 categories mentioned above (currently 10 + misc, though I hope misc can be disposed of for the release), the noms page is closer to what we will end up with. Almost every article in V0.5 carries one of the ten categories in its tag, that was done deliberately so we don't need to hand sort. For WPCD2 I notice they have started adding some categories like this, though many articles still have the basic tag. Walkerma 17:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I see your categories now -

{ category Miscellaneous | Arts | Langlit | Philrelig | Everydaylife | Socsci | Geography | History | Engtech | Math | Natsci }

And the (very important) Uncategorized category. Still a lot of work to be done there. FYI - my current 4000+ list of articles have these categories on the Main article page (not Talk:) - sorted by frequency:-

144| Category:Living people
105| Category:Chemical elements
 60| Category:Wildlife of Africa
 58| Category:Demographics by country
 54| Category:Coastal cities
 52| Category:African Union member states
 50| Category:Island nations
 41| Category:Landlocked countries
 40| Category:Capitals in Africa
 39| Category:Presidents of the United States
 38| Category:English-speaking countries
 35| Category:Transition metals
 35| Category:Monarchies
 31| Category:Metropolis
 30| Category:Atlantic hurricanes
 29| Category:Fellows of the Royal Society
 26| Category:Freemasons
 25| Category:Cretaceous dinosaurs
 24| Category:Spanish-speaking countries
 22| Category:Herbs
 22| Category:Republics
 22| Category:Members of the Commonwealth of Nations
 22| Category:Autodidacts

Well, I am glad Africa is listed so prominently :-) (Not sure why some of these are red-linked ?) Wizzy…☎ 11:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Category:Monarchies should be Category:Monarchy but I don't know for Category:Metropolis though. Lincher 02:50, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Further investigation leads me to believe these are recently deleted categories. My dump is from 18 May 2006. Wizzy…☎ 08:21, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures

Pictures - yes, it definitely needs these. Some quick math - User:BozMo/wpcd2 has about 4000 articles. They occupy 140Meg uncompressed. That leaves about 500Meg on the CD. That means each article has about 120 bytes (yes, bytes) of pictures :-( My experimentation finds that even a thumbnail needs about 20K. Seems some major selection needs to be done, or ... ??

I think 500,000 kB / 4000 articles means 120 kB per article, so it's not as bad as you say, it's about 6 picture thumbnails per article. But many of the articles on the CD are well-developed articles (B-Class or above) so they will tend to have a lot of pictures, and you may still have to chop things down a bit. User:Polimerek from Polish Wikipedia told me that for their DVD release (also coming out this fall) they plan to (a) remove articles with dubious copyright, (b) strip out all galleries and (c) just keep the first three pictures from each article. For WPCD2 you would be doing (a) first anyway, then (b) if you need to, and only go further as the need arises. Bear in mind the Poles have 250,000 articles to process so everything has to be automated - but in (for example) Bangalore you would remove the modern map of the city, which I would want to keep in. I suspect that just removing fair use images and compressing the rest to thumbnails may be sufficient for WPCD, and is almost certainly enough for Version 0.5. Walkerma 17:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Working from an old picture archive I have from last year, I have 3034 pictures out of the 18529 total needed. I have put a request for the others here. That is about 1/6th of the ones necessary. I work through the HTML, where the <div> enclosure indicates the required picture size. I use the unix convert command to resize the pictures, and edit the HTML to reference that picture (all automated). Pictures so far occupy 87Meg, at default compression, indicating that when I have all the other pictures it will be under 500Meg. It is looking great! Wizzy…☎ 16:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bot stuff

Does anyone have any insight what is going on around "Obotrites" and "Rukai people" in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Ethnic_groups_articles_by_quality&oldid=82766804 this bot-generated page]? We're just starting on this stuff in Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. - Jmabel | Talk 07:31, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Non-article class parameters

Can anyone advise on how the non-article class parameters are supposed to work for the purposes of these combined WikiProject/assesment banners being placed on non-article talk pages? I have seen these banners placed on talk pages for relevant categories and template using class=NA, class=template, class=category, and so on. But the approach doesn't seem completely consistent.

An example is Category:Template-Class_film_articles where the Film WikiProject has grouped templates that have been "rated" template-class. This imprecise wording is avoided if the "NA wording" is used to say that the template is a template and doesn't need rating. Some template have been set up to do this, but I can't find any examples at the moment. Can anyone remind me where they are, or how to tweak the wording?

Going back to the film non-article parameters. The blurb on Category:Film_articles_by_quality shows that the system has been extended to include other classes such as List, Category and Disambig (I haven't found anyone yet using a "redirect" class to organise redirects, though see Category:Middle-earth redirects). I assume, that like the NA classification, these "non-article" classifications don't appear in the film quality statistics page and other stats pages, which I believe are maintained by a bot. I can understand why it doesn't include them directly, but what is the best way to generate statistics based on these non-article parameters such as NA, category, and template?

An alternative approach is seen at WikiProject Middle-earth, where Template:ME-project is used on article talk pages, Template:ME-category is used on category talk pages, and Template:ME-template is used on template pages.

Is there any reason to prefer putting all the parameters inside one template (as in the Film WikiProject), or to use separate banners (the Middle-earth WikiProject)? I prefer the latter approach, but was wondering if the assessment statistcs approach could be adapted to include stats on the number of templates, categories and other non-article pages? Carcharoth 11:32, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Another approach is the one I have started at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Middle-earth/Assessment#Page_types, where I am proposing a separate set of "page type" parameters and a separate line in the banner on which to display this parameter. Would this be helpful? Part of the reason for this is that it would be helpful to be able to assess some lists (currently, people tend to mix a "list" parameter into the rating scale), and in some cases to assess some of the larger templates (though this is not essential). Carcharoth 15:00, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
I can't really answer this, but I've copied it in its entirety over to Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index#Non-article_class_parameters. We tend to discuss template/bot technical issues on that page, and it gets a lot of knowledgable people passing through. Walkerma 05:28, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. Carcharoth 10:01, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Opening up nominations for the next version?

Should we open up Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations? This page was designed to be a "rolling" page that would be perhaps Version 0.7 at first, then become perhaps Version 0.8, and so on. I think we should open it up because:

  • Version 0.5 closed its nominations almost two months ago, and reviewing is getting close to complete.
  • I think we are gearing up to start work on the next release anyway.
  • These general nomination pages don't get that many nominations, so I don't see us getting too many coming in while we finish off Version 0.5. If we're not working on countries or FAs, we can clear any backlog in a couple of days, I think.
  • Two or three people have already tried to nominate.

Do others agree with us opening this up now? Walkerma 05:36, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

I'd be wary of opening it until we actually are close to finishing v0.5. For example, there may be issues with the nomination process that we haven't observed, and that we may notice when a publisher points them out to us; also, opening the page after an actual release would bring in extra reviewers. By the way, how is work going on the publishing aspect of the release? I haven't beem as active on Wikipedia as I would like to be, so there may be things I missed and don't know about... Titoxd(?!?) 06:17, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
I've been kept pretty busy with work, I have a pile of 60 lab reports next to me right now! That means all of my wiki-time has been spent on finishing off the reviewing, no time to chase publishers. We are getting close to finishing, but there are still >100 articles to review. We all do what we can! Cheers, Walkerma 05:23, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Progress

This section should be updated every once in a while. Don't post new bullets; just modify these and sign your name.

Progress:

Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 02:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:29, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IRC meeting

Walkerma asked me on my talk page whether we should have another IRC meeting or not. We haven't had one in a while, so here are the preliminary details:

Time
3:00 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time), 11-04-06 (23:00 UTC)

Channel: #wikipedia-1.0

Topics
A deadline, what to do next, list more here:
  1. A CVS or SVN repository for files related to the CD
    I would like the ability to select articles by category, with a top-up list of articles. Requirements should be the article dump, the category dump, and a script to pull the thumbnailed pictures (for articles) from the main server or the (huge) picture dump. Wizzy…☎ 09:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  2. Work Via Wikiprojects and the CD
  3. Looking for a publisher
  4. (If time) Use of MartinbotII to automagically generate article lists; see this, the results of the first Chem pilot run and subsequent results on other trials.
  5. A complete list for Work Via Wikiprojects, not separated by wikiproject
Attendees
  1. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:13, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
  2. Walkerma 17:58, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
  3. Kirill Lokshin 18:00, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
  4. +sj + 19:01, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
  5. Wizzy…☎ 09:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  6. Martinp23 12:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  7. Polimerek 23:25, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Discussion

Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:13, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Um, which day is it going to be? Titoxd(?!?) 01:14, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
That was fast! Oops! It is going to be this Saturday. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:16, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
It makes 22PM CET if I'm right, I will be there. I'm, in France, in contact with a software company. They plan to realease an demonstration ISO of a an offline-reader for the 14/11/06. It will be a XUL standalone application for windows, working with the last "SOS children village" HTML dump and integrating a self-made search engine. The engine will be able to deal with differents languages specs. They want to manage the publishing stuff themself. Kelson 08:22, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Can we just confirm that the time for this meeting is 6pm EST and 23:00 UTC? If so, Emmanuel will have to join us at midnight, not at 22:00 CET, I think. I'd like to contact a couple of other Europeans, so I want to make sure we have it right. Walkerma 16:02, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Followup from IRC

I have added more information to Walkerma's page at m:Static version tools to describe my process. All other input gratefully received. Wizzy…☎ 09:04, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! I see Emmanuel has posted something on the talk page there. Once the Polish group has got their DVD into production they may have time to share their scripts with us too. We need to make sure that every language doesn't have to write their own version of the same software! Walkerma 06:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] update

Hello

So, what's up with this project ? Where does it stand right now ? Can we help ? Anthere

Oh, certainly! Currently, we've selected the articles we are going to include in the test release, Version 0.5. However, we're working on the software (for the CD release), and we would appreciate finding a publisher (for the paper release). Titoxd(?!?) 22:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken, a publisher would also (and perhaps primarily?) be appropriate for the CD release? I would think that pressed CDs/DVDs would be a much more attractive venture for one than actual paper printings of the material. Kirill Lokshin 23:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, mental mistake there. I guess it is because I am personally more excited about a printed release than a CD/DVD release, but that's just me... Titoxd(?!?) 01:26, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for dropping by, Anthere! If you listen to Episode 5 of Wikipedia Weekly, you can hear the latest (recorded early this morning). We have finished indeed reviewing articles (almost 2000) - last night, to be precise - and now we just need to get CDs produced. I agree with Kirill that we will probably just do a CD this time around, unless a paper publisher appears - but I would like to see us produce a paper edition later on. For software, we are hoping to use the contact Emmanuel has in Paris, we should know by Tuesday whether or not the demo of the offline reader has been successful. The Parisian company will also produce the CD for us - 30,000 copies were mentioned, but maybe that includes a future French release too! If anyone can find out about what software the Germans have (to share) that would be a great help - I've requested information several times from Mathias Schindler but heard nothing back so far. We have set up a place on meta to share software tools.
Tito and Kirill, you're most welcome to help us out! We need to compare the category listing (generated by talk page headers) against the listing on the V1.0 page. I have found that sometimes people added an article in one place but not the other. I hope that by Tuesday we can have a comprehensive list. Eyu100 has been producing a list here, but I'm not sure which source he is using. Let us know if you can help - the clock is ticking now! Walkerma 01:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok. I had a hack at the big list, and I tried to make it more usable for us. So we only have to strike out whatever is both on WP:V0.5 and is tagged on the talk page, right? Titoxd(?!?) 02:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't think we need to do any strikeouts, since we're dealing with complete lists. Thanks Tito! Actually, I found I was able to do this easily in AWB! I didn't realise this would work so easily. See Wikipedia:Version 0.5/biglist, this combines the category listing with any additional ones found on the Version 0.5 page (most differences came from pages that changed their names, or typos). The talk pages still need to be tagged - I'm very tired and need to go to bed soon. This only gives the article names, though, not the historical version. This week I'll go through the logs to see which articles have declined in assessment, and compare the versions - I'll try and note any articles where we should use the older version (I expect this only to be a handful). If you find anything different doing this job your way, let us know, Tito! Walkerma 04:38, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, there are some differences between the two lists we've generated, sadly. So, your list is from the category? Mine is from the listing, so that should be a pretty accurate depiction of what does not match... Titoxd(?!?) 04:52, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) I've posted my "differences" list (generated by AWB list comparer) at User:Walkerma/Sandbox2. This represents the articles found on WP:V0.5 but not found in Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5. It is obvious that the WP:V0.5 list was not always updated after articles were tagged - AWB indicates 421 "missing" articles (though some of these are simply the different spellings I noted above). So I'm treating the category listing as the authentic one, and the V0.5 page simply as a place to catch a few missing ones. Walkerma 05:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I still think we need to be able to pull a list, as a query, from wikipedia. A page with the article list will quickly become unmanageable, and suffers from the standard problem of the same information (the list) in two different places. This is not just a 0.5 project - this is a process and pathfinder for 1.0, 1.1, a chemistry special, whatever. The category, or (better) a category of categories (Countries, Elements, Animals, Plants) and a top-up list to catch the others should be built. The information should be in one place. Wizzy…☎ 06:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

We do already have Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5 (which include all articles) and eleven subcategories such as History, Mathematics, etc. Will that suffice, or is there something else you think needs to be done? Walkerma 07:16, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
No - I think that is fine. I have not looked that closely, but I was trying to figure out how some articles (like countries and elements) got missed. Wizzy…☎ 10:07, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Also, I've added in the chemical elements. Apparently I missed poor terbium from the list - now added into the biglist. I've also gone through the "differences list, and tagged articles that weren't tagged before. Walkerma 07:16, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Just wondering what happened with Taiwan... if we leave it out, we're going to get accused of bias. Titoxd(?!?) 07:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
It's listed under Republic of China. I had no idea that there were two separate articles! I had spotted that there is a PR China article (about the present state) and a separate China article (about the entity with a rich history going back millenia), and I tagged both. I never thought Taiwan would have two articles. Do you think we need both? Walkerma 07:31, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I just checked {{0.5 nom}} and {{0.5 set nom}} since some that had been missed still carried one of these templates. I updated the held template and used that a bit, and removed the nomination tags from article talk pages. Walkerma 07:43, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I have gone through all of Mathbot's logs for Version 0.5, looking for articles that declined in assessment rating, or were listed as removed from the listing. For the latter, I didn't find any that were permanently removed (except a handful added inappropriately) For the former I've created Wikipedia:Version 0.5/degraded article log, and I will look over these articles in the next couple of days to see whether the articles actually degraded or whether they were simply re-evaluated. If they did go noticably downhill I will tag an older version for inclusion. (Note: Chemists such as myself use the verb degrade as an intransitive verb, I hope that's OK!). Walkerma 08:02, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Initial responses on the French offline reader suggest that it may not be fully ready for use in Version 0.5, but it might perhaps be used in a later version. Does anyone have access to the German software & scripts? Walkerma 08:13, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adding redirects into Version 0.5 and beyond

This has been raised as being an important issue to resolve. If we end up NOT using an offline reader (I'm still contacting people to try and find out about that!), how can we do this? Can someone who knows Javascripts (or whatever) please explain the various options in terms even a simpleton like me can understand? Thanks! Walkerma 15:45, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Opening the release version nominations? WP:WPRVN

We have a large review team, and currently they have nothing to do because Version 0.5 reviewing is done, so should we open up the release version nominations? There are still some things that need to be done, like ask Mathbot to keep track of articles, fix the design of WP:WPRV, etc. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 23:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, have been waiting for that for a long time and since I do not know much about the rest of the activity that there is to do (most of it is offline stuff now) I can't lend a hand anyway. I would like to nominate new pages and maybe help with the reviewing this time. Can a WP:0.7 version be created or something like that to organize such. Lincher 03:54, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes! Please go ahead! (Maybe we need to hear from one or two others, like Tito). I definitely think we should be working on this while Version 0.5 is coming out (I wanted to start it a while ago too!). For myself I will be quite tied up with V0.5, but later on I can help with reviewing. People I've spoken with seem to be happy to call this next release Version 0.7, and to use this to expand things from Version 0.5, should we go for that? The idea of the "Release Versions" page was that it could be a rolling page for whatever is the current version, so we have one standard link where people can nominate things. Once a version nomination closes, the list would be transferred off that page, then the page re-opened for whatever is the next version. Do you think that could work? Meanwhile we can get User:MartinbotII up and running to get ready for a bigger release pulled from the Mathbot data.
As for the approach used, I think we should open that up for discussion. Eyu100, will you be taking the helm for this version? If so, perhaps you could give us your views on the release to kick things off? Walkerma 04:27, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmm. How are we going to open it if the format we're going to use is still up in the air? I would think it would be better to figure out which one we're going to use before making that decision... Titoxd(?!?) 06:13, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, let's agree on that in the next day or two so we can get started ASAP? Since we haven't heard from eyu100, I'll start the ball rolling. Let's do the following:
  • Have general nominations and set nominations as with Version 0.5, reviewed as before.
  • Set up review pages for WP:GAs, WP:VAs, the core supplement, plus a cities page listing all cities listed at List of cities by population, List of metropolitan areas by population and all capital cities of the world (as listed here, but limited just to sovereign nations). I'd also like to see a states & provinces page covering Australia, Canada, USA, India, South Africa, China and perhaps Germany and some Anglophone countries I've missed (but UK counties, French departments etc are a bit small for this release, IMHO). If someone has the time, we should probably also set up an FA review page for FAs not covered by V0.5 (new or not reviewed).
  • Set up a Todo page.
  • Contact all members of the review team announcing the new project.
  • Close the nominations on (say) March 31, 2007 and aim to close all reviews by May 31, 2007.
Also see my comments in the "perfecting V0.5" discussion below. What do others think - eyu100, Tito, Lincher, .....? Walkerma 07:35, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
This idea sounds good, I have created a basic To do list at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations/To do where everything is red link but everything can be copied from the V0.5 pages. If there are missing things, please fill in the gaps. If you feel I wasn't precise enough, change the wording. Also, everypage is a subpage of Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations which will remove any confusion and be helpful for going back to the nomination page.
I had a question ... are the articles from V0.5 automatically in or not, and that is the reason for the Version 0.5 review page I have created in order to do a quick review of V0.5, maybe at the end of the V0.7 or so.
For everything else, I say let's get the ball rolling. Lincher 15:52, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Should everything from Version 0.5 be included? I'd say yes, I'm pretty happy with the content of V0.5, and we want to build on that. I'd like to hear what eyu100 thinks on this issue, but I have the impression he's said the same thing. I'm checking the delisted FAs (and other articles that have been downgraded) in V0.5 myself this weekend, but I don't expect to remove any from the list - at worst, if the article really has gone downhill (rare) we'll use the originally-reviewed version.
We also need to think about templates. I'd like to have a Release Version template that works like {{V0.5}}, but also (assuming we're keeping all of V0.5) change the {{V0.5}} to say "This article is in Version 0.7 and 0.5" - that way we avoid cluttering up talk pages with lots of templates (and annoying people who we need to help us!). I think we should give eyu100 and Tito a chance to comment before we open things up, but then let's get things under way. Thanks for your input and for setting up those pages! Cheers, Walkerma 17:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, by default everything is v0.5 should be included into Version 0.7. However, I am still not sure about this method. The part about v0.5 that really annoyed me was that there were so many subpages, that some of them I didn't even know existed until the list below was made. As for the reviewing, I agree, we should start soon, but at the same time, we need to be sure that we're not doing the same mistakes in v0.5. So, the question becomes, "Which mistakes did we do that we don't want to do again?" I'd hold until we get some answers to that question. Titoxd(?!?) 20:47, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
To Walkerma: Yes, I will be coordinating the release version (unless many people object). I think we should open this after we get all the templates set up. I'm changing the V0.5 template if it hasn't been changed already to use one box instead of two. How much progress is being made at WP:WVWP? There should be a final list for MartinbotII to run through after most of the important Wikiprojects are contacted. How many articles should there be? I'll wait for Tito's reply and then open up the nominations. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 20:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Just make sure you include the other category, not just Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5, in the template, and feel free to nuke the other box. Titoxd(?!?) 20:47, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Sorry I've been rather away this weekend (normally my most active time), I've been rather sick. In reply to Tito's question "Which mistakes did we do that we don't want to do again?", I think I've pretty much answered that question in the section below where Lincher in effect asked the same question and raised the same issues. I've copied that answer here - does this address your concerns?
I would suggest the following for Version 0.7:
  • Limit the discussions to the talk pages of Wikipedia:Release Version and Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations, with more global issues discussed here.
  • Plan what review pages we intend to use, and set up redirects from their talk pages when we create them. Update the navigation template, or design a new one, including all the review pages and the Todo page. Remove old redundant pages (such as Version 0.5) from this template.
  • Set up a Todo page from the start, possibly with its own talk page or possibly using the main Release Version talk page. (Lincher has done this already)
Besides the three main pages listed above, the other proposed sub-pages are: Set Nominations, GA Review, Vital articles/Core supplement review, Cities review, States & provinces review. Would this set be OK? These could all fit comfortably into the navigation template.
Regarding eyu100's questions - if we used the above dates as a guide, I think 4000 articles is fairly achievable, though it depends somewhat on how many active reviewers we have (I'd personally like to do some other wikiwork - I did little but reviewing for two months). Are you OK with the other proposals, eyu100? I hope to revive contacting WikiProjects at WVWP soon, but of course the Mathbot side of WVWP continues to grow at an amazing rate. One problem is that coverage is still patchy - one US state will copy what another state is doing, but the people who do Fine Arts or Dance are either unaware of assessments or not focused enough to participate. I think we should have a broad enough coverage by next summer to give MartinbotII a suitable range of articles to draw from, so we can aim from a bot-derived article selection then IMHO.
So, are we ready now? If not, can you suggest (a) what other mistakes I'm ignoring (I'm sure there are some!) and (b) what we can do to avoid them this time around? Thanks, Walkerma 03:26, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, you pretty much covered everything. What I would do is to get rid of all the 0.5 stuff and put into a separate navigation template, then on the main {{Wikipedia 1.0 Navigation}}, link to both that template and a new, v0.7 template for the new pages. I'd also like to know what the importance criteria are going to be this time around; they cannot be as strict as 0.5's, but since it qualifies again as a test release, there's still some restrictions on it, I would think. If the opposite is true, and we're making quality assessments only, then keeping an eye on FAC and GAN would be a good idea, as well. Just those questions, but otherwise, we're good to go. Titoxd(?!?) 07:08, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
My opinion on the importance criterion would be to have almost all core subjects, the Vital articles plus High articles (maybe the best from every Project from Mathbot's listing) and the necessary Mid quality that can be linked in some way or another to the other High and Core so we build a network of articles that can be linked from one another.
Also, I will soon make bulk nominations of articles that are High quality/Top or High importance from the various wikiprojects and with that we will go on. Lincher 18:08, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Overview of what V0.5 was/Things to perfect

After standing aside and letting you guys work on Version 0.5 (since I jumped in late and wasn't able to help you guys too much), I can only point to the few things that didn't let me take part of the process :

  • The discussion wasn't centralized : in fact, everything should be redirected to the talk page of WP:1 in order to help the noobs (like me) find their way into the project.
  • There should be a Todo list that is linked from the WP:1 page (the one that was available, you had to know where it was).
  • The architecture is overwhelming. Just having a better architecture of what are the different pages used for the reviewing and a clear master list on the WP:1 page too would help the newcomers. Also, what is necessary is to archive the present Version 0.5 subpages. Here is the complete list (I didn't catch what is on the users subpages) :

I hope that this help the WP0.5 people that are doing a marvelous job as of now. I just wanted to give a few pointers of what could be done to have a better approach toward doing the next release version. Lincher 13:48, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Great commentary! (And polite, too - thanks for that!) It's good to see the view of someone who hasn't been so close to the project as I have. We did talk about consolidating talk pages early on, but it would've been difficult to do at that point. I disagree that things should be discussed here - at some stages we would have been archiving every couple of days. With hindsight I'd rather have seen things were discussed at Talk, with (perhaps) other talk pages allowed at Talk and Talk. The reason for all this is of course that we changed mid-project from a single nomination page to multiple nomination/strikeout pages; this fresh approach turned out to be pivotal in getting the job done, but a side-effect was the generation of all of these new pages. The Set Nominations subpages were all transcluded onto one page (and an archive after review), so that situation is not as bad as it might seem from the above. For archiving these, I'm open to suggestions - the set nom pages are already archived, though.
Before we started created the navigation template seen at the top of this page - that was expected to show all the pages we would have! We added some of them in as they were created, but this became difficult. Once I found myself reviewing mostly by myself or with eyu100, I gave up on editing the template! The Todo list was only created quite recently, that's why it never got included. I was asked by JoeSmack in September to create a project map for the whole of the 1.0 project (not just 0.5), and I quickly realised that would take me some time - time I couldn't afford to take away from reviewing! ([[WP:WVWP has a labyrinth of pages too!) One of my New Year projects is to do this. Bear in mind that 15 months ago there were only two pages associated with the Wikipedia 1.0 project - so naturally still finding our way.
For Version 0.7, we will probably want a set of similar pages, such as strikeout pages for vital articles and good articles, and perhaps capital cities too. We will probably want a set nominations page again. Since we are not quite so much in pioneer country any more, things are hopefully much more predictable - so we can probably get the navigation system set up now. Based on your comments I would suggest the following for Version 0.7:
  • Limit the discussions to the talk pages of Wikipedia:Release Version and Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations, with more global issues discussed here.
  • Plan what review pages we intend to use, and set up redirects from their talk pages when we create them. Update the navigation template, or design a new one, including all the review pages and the Todo page. Remove old redundant pages (such as Version 0.5) from this template.
  • Set up a Todo page from the start, possibly with its own talk page or possibly using the main Release Version talk page.
Thanks for your work and for sharing your ideas. I hope you can be involved with reviewing for Version 0.7! Walkerma 07:15, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe for the archiving, it could work like this :
Version 0.5 stays as it is, Release version exists until release and then it is dumped onto Version 0.7 pages. Then, Release version becomes the next version ... 1.0, which will reside on the Release version pages and then be dumped onto Version 1.0, what do you think? Lincher 15:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
That's the plan - that way people can make permanent links to "Whatever is the current version," and these will stay the same through all the versions. Walkerma 17:24, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] V0.7 launch

Things to do, things that have been done (don't start a new thread, just continue the list) :

Also, some one has created {{Releaseversion nom}} and {{Releaseversion}} which is a copy of {{0.7 nom}} and {{0.7 set nom}} and {{V0.7}}. I do not know which one is the best to use, the only thing I know is if we go from using 0.5 to release version that will mess people up. Although if we stick with V0.5 to V0.7, people will know we have just switched version and we are now doing a new batch of reviewing. Also, since everything will fall under V0.7 later, when we archive, changing the templates will be tedious and so just having the 0.7 template will make the release versions' archival roll faster. Lincher 19:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Poke someone at meta, probably Delphine, if you want to have a foundation-based logo, or Essjay, who designed the 0.5 logo we currently use. Titoxd(?!?) 05:19, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
We can use the release version pages and then move all the articles to a V0.7 pages when we are done to avoid template changing once we get to the next version. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 14:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok then, so {{Releaseversion nom}} will be used for nominating articles and {{Releaseversion}} for reviewed articles for now. Later we will change the templates to {{V0.7}} as the WP:WPRV will end. Lincher 15:18, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I was asked to put together a logo matching the one I did for .5, but with .7 as the text; I have done so, as shown above. Essjay (Talk) 02:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Review question

First, do we need to know the subject to review it? Do we need to fact check the statements (or everything)??? After readint through and finding errors, if minor we correct them? If major, we reject the nomination? Those questions are to be in sync with you guys' reviewing. Lincher 04:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

At this point, reviewers can't be expected to know everything about everything - though by all means focus on areas you know better. There are some things that are relatively easy - how well referenced the article is, the quality of the English, the thing is plastered with POV tags (though with articles like Islam that's kinda inevitable!), layout (headings, pictures). If you know the field at all you can probably judge if the article is reasonably complete or not. With some standard types of articles like cities (or biographies) there are some standard headings (for cities such as Dallas, Texas there are history, culture/tourism, demographics, politics/administration, geography, transport, possibly education), this makes it easy when you are reviewing hundreds of similar articles! I'd say that if it falls outside the "must-have-if-at-all-possible" area (Core/Vital articles etc) then usually a decent B-Class is the minimum standard we accept, unless it's an important article in a set nomination. I'll write up an FAQ on this once my job and Version 0.5 let me have the time. Walkerma 06:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I meant to say - if it's an area I'm familiar with I take about 5 minutes per article (obviously I don't read the whole thing in that case, just selections). If it's an area I don't know well it'll be longer. Whether I fix things (or leave comments on the talk page) depends on whether or not I have the time, though I have probably done this on several hundred that I've looked at. Some might say a more thorough review should be done, but if we'd all done that, our release would consist mostly of 500 FAs on mainly obscure topics! Walkerma 06:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the succinct and very informative answer. Lincher 13:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Names of releases, filenames

Those interested in how the releases are to be named, please see Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Torrent_Project#More_informative_file_names (and the section above that) and comment. Paleorthid has some excellent suggestions, IMHO. Walkerma 07:33, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Time span of reviewing

We now need to decide on a date when we end the nomination process and also decide when we start planning for the actual release of the V0.7 (release version). Lincher 15:29, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Up above I suggested "Close the nominations on (say) March 31, 2007 and aim to close all reviews by May 31, 2007." No one has objected to that - does that mean everyone has agreed to that? I think it's a little up in the air because we don't know how the bot assessment scheme will go, but perhaps we can use it as a goal? Walkerma 21:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Evaluating 0.5

Given that we've basically finished with 0.5, I think now would be a good time to make a few comments on how successful the effort was. A number of these will be rather harshly critical; I apologize in advance to anyone whom I offend here.

In January 2006, a CD selection of Wikipedia was released, containing 2000 articles. Now, after almost a year of effort, including massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects, we've collected, for 0.5, a grand total of... 1960 articles! (Give or take a few; I'm not entirely sure of how accurate the bot count is at the moment.) To make matters worse, most of these came from already existing listings (the FA list and the various core topics lists), rather than being spontaneous nominations.

Much of this apparent lack of progress can be attributed to the fact that it was meant to be a "test release", of course. But it was my understanding, in any case, that the crude methods adopted were directly linked to that; in other words, that our Byzantine way of choosing articles was a function of the tight schedule and the newness of the program, and would be abandoned once we had something more effective. Instead, it seems that 0.7 is going to institutionalize "slow and miniscule" as the model that Wikipedia releases are going to follow, and "arbitrarily complicated" as the method for getting articles into them. Quite frankly, I don't see the point, when far more efficient (if somewhat less artificially controlled) means are now readily available. Kirill Lokshin 22:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

2 things to start off from, the difference between both release is that one was hand picked and barely looked over (The first WPCD release). The second was also hand picked but were from lists that contained long articles and they were man-assessed.
On another note, the 0.7 will probably go faster in that we will pick articles directly from the Index that Mathbot creates. Also, there will be more reviewers (I think there were 4 at the max, 1 at the lowest for the first release).
Also, we know things were dispersed and tough to get to, which means stick to 1 place for, the todo list and the discussions will also be merged and redirected so we don't dilute the information.
Lastly, now that we are on the roll, it will go mucho fasto this time around.
Aside, for you Kirill, feel free to dump bulk of articles onto the nomination page, I'm waiting to get some to review some (other that the ones I nominated). Lincher 22:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Lincher here. I think "almost a year of effort, including massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects" is true of Wikipedia 1.0 as a whole, as we gear up for full-blown versions. But for Version 0.5 most of the work on Version 0.5 was done by a handful of people, and the project ran for six months. My goal at the start was to have around 2000 articles by October, and instead we have 1960 articles by November - I'm OK with that. There are several reasons why this was perfectly reasonably with Version 0.5:
  1. We had to produce a product a reasonable time, to show we could deliver, especially given the history of the English 1.0 project (several years of talk, but no progress at all towards an actual product). Relying on bot assessments to compile a CD would have been silly in May 2006, when we had only about 5000 articles listed (many from MILHIST!).
  2. As I see it, and I think some others in the project feel the same, it is necessary for us to have a solid core of articles giving us a foundation for larger releases. I accept that probably at least 500 articles in the release are FAs that are more "fluff" in terms of importance, but the remaining 1500 are a good start. We can't use bot assessments alone, or we will end up with a non-representative selection.
  3. Don't underestimate what 1960 articles represents - it represents a set of books totalling perhaps 8000 pages with perhaps 8000 pictures - equivalent to 0.5 metres of shelf space. It represents soemthing 10% of the size of World Book, which has taken almost 90 years to reach 18,000 articles - albeit with much better fact-checking than we have.
  4. The January 2006 release represented a lot of work, too, as it used the same methods as we did to manually check articles. Like us, they used lists like the GA list. It was a great start, but that work was not done within the Wikipedia community, so it couldn't easily be used here. With the articles being hand-picked, it represented topics relevant to the charity concerned (such as Africa), but this was not a solid base from which to build our releases - for example Port Louis and Bissau are included, but Rome and Athens are not.
  5. We represent the main language of the world's #1 online information source. The whole world is watching us. If we produce a large DVD that is poorly done, it will be ridiculed in the late night talk shows in the US, and in satire in the UK. If we take a more conservative route to produce a more solid product it may take longer, but instead the media will either ignore it or hail it as a challenge to Britannica.
  6. Just today I have been involved in negotiations to set up a publishing deal that will help us build a relationship ready for larger releases next year. Do you think I could have done that if I didn't have a test set of articles? Any more than my old indie pop band in England could have got a gig without a demo tape of 4 songs?
That work must continue - that's why Version 0.7 is needed. As I understand it, the plans are for a hybrid, allowing us to make progress as we did on 0.5 while evaluating new automated systems such as MartinbotII. If we used our automated systems alone, we would produce an article selection strong in Military History, Physical Sciences and pop culture but very weak in Fine Arts, the business world and Social Sciences. We're just not ready to go completely over to automation. My impression from Version 0.5 is that for the long term we will want to have around 5000 articles that are on a broad range of key topics. Some of that will come from WikiProject bot assessments sifting through importance data, some of it via more traditional tables from WVWP, but much of it will have to be found using the methods of Version 0.5. And it's not as if we didn't learn anything - things like the Set Nominations system allowed us to add some things (such as the 117 chemical elements) very rapidly - so the next 1000 will be much less work than the first 1000. Note that essentially two reviewers managed to cover 500 articles between them in the last month or so. I actually think that many of your criticisms relate to how things worked near the start, rather than near the end of V0.5. Also, if you know of any methods that are even better than those we are using, please tell us!
I also happen to think that even in five years time when we have bots running most things, we will still want to have open nominations - this approach provides a place for anyone to say, "This is good, you should include it." In terms of direct article numbers it actually has little effect (as you point out), and so it takes up a small proportion of reviewers' time, but it ensures that the community can have a direct voice in what we do, and can help open up whole new subject areas.
In a routine email today, I estimated that we could produce a release of 10,000-20,000 by next fall, most of which would be both (a) important topics and (b) good quality articles. It will provide the basis for solid releases on CD, DVD and paper for many years to come. It will give us a product which we can be proud of - something Jimbo can happily wave in front of TV cameras (as he has done with the German releases). Something like that would have seemed miraculous even one year ago. I think that by this time next year people will see that the "massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects" have all been worthwhile. Walkerma 07:12, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
There are still two main problems, to my mind, with the approach we're taking.
  • First, we're persistently going for the quick-and-dirty fix rather than the version that makes sense in the long run, even though we're not constrained by the schedule. For example, the discussion of a separate nomination area for capital cities could be replaced with "get WikiProject Cities to start assessments". Bot assessments may not solve everything, but they scale much better than any centralized review process. The same can be said for our other gaps in coverage; rather than relying on auxiliary centralized reviews to bring them in, why not push the WikiProjects that cover them to provide the articles directly?
  • Second, too much effort is being devoted to keeping things out of the release rather than putting them in. A simple strategy of ORing off high quality/importance articles from the bot lists and then going through the resulting list (not to do a comprehensive review, but merely to catch anything truly trivial) would be both faster than trying to collect the same coverage by hand, and produce much larger releases than what we have now. There is no need, in my opinion, for any absurdly complicated processing of the bot lists; our strategy should be to release all the important stuff and anything else that's useful, not all the important stuff and nothing else. (The world will not suddenly hate Wikipedia if, by some chance, Spoo slips into a release version, in any case; for a sufficiently large set of articles in total, nobody will care about the incidental trivia.)
We could very easily have 20,000 articles to work with right now. They wouldn't cover everything that we ought to have, granted, and so we'd still need to add more; but what real benefit are we getting from systematically excluding usable material from the releases because it exceeds "the quota" for some particular topic? Kirill Lokshin 11:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Kirill brings up good points, although I'm not sure that we can actually do anything about them. For example, we cannot force WikiProject Cities to begin assessing articles if it isn't a priority for them. We can suggest, but I'm not sure that pushing WikiProjects is the method we want to take here.
As for what approach we should take? We need to make sure we publish everything that passes a certain criteria of importance (e.g. all capital cities of the world, for example) and then, when we know we've covered pretty much everything about that, to begin adding "fluff". If I understood correctly, that's the method that's going to be taken: we will obtain our lists from the assessment tables of different WikiProjects, then we will do a quick double-check for quality. More eyes are better than fewer eyes.
However, that said, I'm not a fan of the method we're using right now either, but I think it would be better if we changed it gradually, instead of outright, as that will allow us to fall back on the old method if the new one doesn't work for some reason. We do need to change it sooner or later, though. For v0.5, it worked, though. Why? Because as Martin said, we needed to have something to show. Martin indicated about the importance of having it when bargaining with a publisher, but when we do publish something, no matter how small the release, many more folks inside the Wikipedia community will come to help us, because they will think, "Oh, so it's not like last time. This time, they were serious." Titoxd(?!?) 16:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Based on the work being done at WP:COUNCIL, "pushing" a WikiProject to start doing assessments is usually trivial; you just have to ask the correct question. The old WVWP-style messages ("Could you somehow come up with some articles...?") aren't particularly useful in this regard; many projects admittedly don't have the time or the technical knowledge to set up an assessment system. A more specific request ("Here's the new assessment system; would you like us to help you set it up for your project?") typically works much better; there are extremely few projects that actually object to doing assessments in principle. (As a bonus, setting up the assessment code in a project banner that's already in use feeds a lot of articles into the unassessed backlog; it might take us a while to go through them, but once they're "in the system", they can easily be used for releases.) Kirill Lokshin 16:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the above comments - these are certainly worth considering. I think part of the disagreement here is the choice between content balance (which I emphasise) and content size (which Kirill emphasises). Maybe I'm being too conservative in that area - but I think Version 0.7 (as a hybrid approach) can allow us to go the way Kirill suggests if things take off that way. I have liked reviewing the most important topics ourselves, to give us some degree of control over our content, but with things like the top 200 biographies we relied on the Biographies WikiProject to give us a list. Speaking personally, I'm very happy to work with an active project like Biographies or Military History, but if a project is pretty dead then I'm more reluctant to rely on it.
I'm wondering if (once MartinbotII is past the pilot stage) maybe we should consider teaming up WP:WVWP and WP:COUNCIL with WP:V0.7 to coordinate this work? In other words, Version 0.7 says "We'd like to get 1000 Arts articles" and the other two groups get to work on this, via some mutually agreed method. That way we can test the bot-based article compilation, but if things fail we can still plod through articles as we have been. If Kirill is right - and I grant that he may be, we could perhaps get 10,000 articles for Version 0.7 while maintaining content balance. Then we're all happy! Could this work? Walkerma 04:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I thought I'd chime in a bit at this point and say I vastly prefer balance to size. Wikipedia currently is experiencing growing pains; Jimbo himself said to knock it off with the size celebrations (1.5 mil articles soon, woOt) and to get down to quality. Wikipedia hasn't been around for a relatively long amount of time (think of how long AIM and forums have been around), yet think of how this form of knowledge and communication will be the 'it's always been there' 5 years down the line. In the long run, doing it right is better than lookin' large (and hey, size comes anyhow, balance is what takes work). Just my 2 cents. JoeSmack Talk 17:47, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Look at the section below and comment there if you are interested in teaming up WVWP and V0.7. It has ideas on how to "fix" the importance ratings given by Wikiprojects. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 15:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Progress on Work Via Wikiprojects

I posted this here because this involves the release version too. How much progress is being made on WVWP? Would it be possible to put some articles (i.e. more than 1000) in the release version if the bot had a lost of articles to go through? We definitely need more than a couple thousand more articles for this version, and this will also give the project something to do besides get article information (which is useless by itself). The rating scale can be improved slightly...

Each Wikiproject gives quality information, which is probably pretty accurate. However, the importance ratings are relative to the Wikiproject (i.e. WikiProject Dallas would probably give Dallas a Top-class rating, but its importance for the release version would probably be Mid-class. This could be partially "fixed" by rating the projects on their relative importance (generally, projects on broader subjects' important articles are more important than important articles of projects about TV shows, for example).

What do you think about this idea? Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 04:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I would love to do something like this - this is something we can get MartinbotII to do. One reason I want someone else to be coordinating 0.7 is precisely because I want to get back to work on WVWP. Before I got involved with 0.5, WVWP was the main focus of my efforts. IMHO, this project is grossly undervalued by the community - it helped projects to start talking together, it helped get projects started with assessments, it set up the bot assessment scheme, and it will ultimately be the source (via bot assessments) of . And yet currently there is no one actively doing things there. Compared to projects like WP:GA and WP:FA it requires very little work - a couple of people can really work wonders there. It's very much like the Parable of the Sower - much falls on stony ground, etc, but the seeds that grow allow us to reap great rewards.
Regarding importance criteria, I think it will be necessary to set up a formula to allow for that. Ideas on how to do that just crystallised for me earlier tonight - interesting you should ask about it now! I plan to adapt eyu100's original algorithm for this purpose. We will be able to compensate for (a) project importance level (e.g., USA vs. Texas vs. Dallas) and (b) assessment practices at the project concerned (e.g., depending whether they have 1 or 100 "top"). The latter isn't a problem now, but I can predict a few projects trying to cram lots of their articles into our releases if there isn't a check built in from the start. (By the way, overall I'd put Dallas in the "High" importance category myself, as it's a global city!) When the formulae are available I will ask for feedback. I will aim to start providing lists of key articles for Version 0.7 via MartinbotII by some time in January, which should give plenty of data by March. Is this OK? Walkerma 07:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this is fine. What should the project importance scale be? Here is an idea:
  • 2.2, world in general (if there is one)
  • 2, continents
  • 1.9, regional blocs like the European Union
  • 1.8, major countries (top fifth percentile GDP)
  • 1.8, science, history, arts, entertainment, etc. (general projects)
  • 1.6, moderately important countries (40th-80th percentile GDP or bigger than and including Iraq)
  • 1.3, minor countries (everything else larger than and including Andorra
  • 1, global cities
  • 0.9, each area of science, history, sports, etc. (major, i.e. Chemistry or Football) (definition of major? >=90,000,000 Google hits?)
  • 0.8, each area of everyday life (major, i.e. Train or Trees, singular, >150 million Google hits)
  • 0.7, each area of science, history, sports, etc. (minor, i.e. Developmental psychology, everything not major)
  • 0.7, tiny countries like Monaco and major cities (1,000,000+ population or a global city, debatable)
  • 0.5, TV shows (major, >=12,500,000 Google hits, after searching for MythBusters, Oprah, and CNN)
  • 0.4, minor cities (not major)
  • 0.2, TV shows (minor, i.e. not major)
The importance of a Wikiproject's articles would be multiplied by its importance rating to get the final rating. These numbers could be tweaked a bit, though. Feel free to edit it without posting a new message. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 16:05, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

That's roughly the sort of thing I had in mind, though I was planning on basing it more on a hierarchy system. There are very detailed "trees" of knowledge produced by professionals in the encyclopedia/library/information science world, and I think I'd like to base the scheme on something like that. Of course these things aren't black & white (e.g., how do you define "minor?"), and people will disagree about relative importance (e.g., I would rank chemistry as equal in importance to the whole of sport - one as a major area of science, one as a major area of recreation). Once I get a rough draft we can debate the details in the usual wiki-fashion until we reach a consensus. Thanks, Walkerma 03:45, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I added more objective criteria to reduce debate. Importance in this case is defined by Google hits (i.e. roughly how many people know about it). Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:19, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I also created a page for rating the importance of projects at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects/Importance because we will need to rate them sometime. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:23, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tagging decent versions of articles

UPDATE: I have checked all of the articles that have been downgraded, as listed at Wikipedia:Version 0.5/degraded article log, and I think we can use recent versions of all of them. I basically fixed the major problems, but generally the "decline" was due to re-evaluation rather than anything else.

So now we can move forward- we need to pull out a decent version of each article. If I'm correct the Germans and Poles did this by getting a "whitelist" of approved editors, then looking for the most recent version by a whitelisted editor. We don't have such a whitelist, and I wasn't planning on writing one, though we may end up with one if Stable Version materialise. Could someone write a script that could find the most recent version by an editor who (a) has a username and (b) has set up a user page for themselves? I would think that would screen out 99% of the vandalised versions. Any thoughts, or offers to help? Walkerma 07:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] V0.5 just a comment

I will only suggest a minor addition to that version since I don't know when it'll get out or such. It would be ideal to have the class tags added to the articles and the Assessment page in order to let people know that what they are looking at is of "that" quality according to standard requirements. Also, if it is possible, have a link to tell the CD users that the actual/non-stable version of such or such article is available at "that place" and that we would appreciate any help in getting this article better for the next release version. Lincher 15:42, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stablepedia

I've created a Stable-Wikipedia miniproject at User:Messedrocker/Stablepedia where individual article revisions that best reflect the four requirements of being accurate/sourced, neutral, clarity, and grammar (such as a featured article just after passing FAC) are listed. If your WikiProject comes up with specific article revisions, be sure to post them there -- follow the instructions. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 23:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Why is this project in user space? —Doug Bell talk 07:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    I started this project as a little project of mine, however by the looks of it, it might just end up as part of WP 1.0. We'll have to play it by ear. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 14:18, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
  • More to the point, why does this project exist? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wikipedia itself stable? Also, just about every WikiProject considers these four requirements when a new article is written (that includes the Editorial Team). This "miniproject" seems a waste of time, if you ask me. (Of course, this is my opinion; if I've broken any rules in voicing it, please freely delete this comment.) --JB Adder | Talk 12:43, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    Wikipedia isn't stable - all articles get changed from time to time. The idea of a stable wikipedia is that you can trust the articles you're reading not to have been recently vandalised, etc. However, there are already lots of schemes working towards various ideas of a stable wikipedia - this very page is part of one of them. There is no point making a new one. --Tango 13:07, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    Indeed, Wikipedia is not stable. However, this is more of a quality-assurance; a way to make sure the article you're reading has been checked for errors and the like. While articles may start up with all the goodness that my little project requires, quality can get lost over time. And I understand that this is one project trying to help — consider it a supplement, or the total list of everything, of WP 1.0. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 14:18, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Your miniproject is clumsy. Please just consult WP:1.0 editorial team. I urge no one else to waste time contributing until his idea has been discussed and, reaching a positive consensus, is enacted in the WIKIPEDIA namespace. --Alfakim-- talk 16:35, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I would like to wait and see the results of the testing of stable versions in the German Wikipedia. At Wikimania it was announced that if the system can be made to work there, it would come to the English Wikipedia (and others too) as official policy supported by the Wikimedia software, as described here and this. Also see WP:STABLE. Walkerma 20:03, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I am aware of these efforts. I am also aware that large scale software improvements such as the Quality Assurance plugin take a long time to implement. We all know about Single User Login, don't we? We can't wait for technical improvements in the distant future when we can do it now (albeit less slick). ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 20:16, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Alfakim, the vast majority of projects start on userspace, so don't try to knock it down. Usually, telling others how not to waste their time is a good way to waste yours. I see no reason for Messedrocker to not keep working on it to give us "trial" data, although we could probably modify Mathbot's tables to include &prev=cur to provide us with a diff. Still, I think it is a good idea. Titoxd(?!?) 22:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I concur, good idea and well planed (also, different from the other ones that died in the egg). It would even be nice to pick these articles to become stable versions from the V0.5 list as to secure versions that we know are good to send to CD/DVD/Paper WP. Lincher 02:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, why was a message about this posted at CVG project, and why should I care? The Kinslayer 15:14, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

A cross-notification was posted at each WikiProject because it would be nice if the WikiProjects worked together to supply revisions of stable versions of articles for my listing. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 15:44, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
My problem with this is having you requesting what can be a pretty significant undertaking from each of the projects before this project of yours has enough backing to even be moved into project space. I think that is premature. —Doug Bell talk 16:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Where the project happens to be hosted is irrelevant. I understand that this is a very large project, and it'll definitely take a while, where the darn page happens to be hosted does not have to do with its maturity as a project. This originally started as my own personal project, but then I decided to get the entire community involved. That being said, as soon as we get a more permanent name[1] we can move this page as, perhaps a subpage of the WP:1.0 project? ★MESSEDROCKER★ 16:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
[1] Apparently, there's already a website called "Stablepedia" so the name should be chanaged ASAP. There's a discussion on the talk page about this.
At the same time, the notification started the discussion about we even want it or not, so it wasn't completely evil. Titoxd(?!?) 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems the eventual solution might be a bot-compliant "stable version" column added to the worklist and assessment tables forming up at the individual projects. Messedrocker's effort is a good exercise on the road to whatever that solution is. -- Paleorthid 17:01, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

The bot tables already have a "version" field, which means that they can be then taggged as "Stable" when a stable version is identified. We should wait until Brion gets that working, though. Titoxd(?!?) 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
As I explained above, we should not have to wait for technical implements when we can do it now. Single User Login, for example, was scheduled to be installed a long time ago, and it has yet to be implemented. It may not be as slick, but if we can do it now then we should do it now, instead of waiting for a gazillion years for new software features. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 00:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Just create a bot, collect all FA and autothrow anything out below a certain number of citations per text volume. The problem is that even well sourced FA's are far from stable. From time to time we have some knowledgeful editors taking a look at articles and they often find a lot to add or restructure, that's the reason for the FAR. Wandalstouring 03:10, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

People can change which revision to link to on the Stablepedia page as articles improve. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 03:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

There is Stablepedia.org[1] which takes pages of wikipedia and calculates a "stable" version of them, using this seems like a waaay better idea plus doesn't waste up and use valuable human time to do this. Mathmo Talk 06:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I am aware of Stablepedia.org's existence, that's why our name needs to be changed. Additionally, I propose a different project. I want this project of mine, Stablepedia-to-be-renamed, to be able quality stable versions, not simply unvandalized stable versions. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 11:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
  • This is a silly idea. All the articles of any value or quality are either a) locked from editing by guests, or b) so big that any change is immedieatly reviewed by several others, and if it is found to be vandalism, is reverted. This is a project that really doesn't need to exist, and I do not believe the aspirations of one person should be represented with a waste of human effort and storage space. Smomo 20:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Many things here my friend, 1) assume good faith, 2) this is not waste of space as we almost have infinite amount of space (Brion says it better than me), 3) we have 17% of errors in 55 articles (that were studied I don't remember where), 4) good editors are outnumbered by vandals as it is (we just have more powerful bots as of now), 5) sneaking information into articles happens everyday and so it is important that we show the public the best material we have to offer (stable versions), 6) it is already going to happen on the de.wikipedia edition so we are just jumping on the bandwagon, 7) tens of thousand of articles are not watched and so they might be plagued by vandalism. Lincher 22:43, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Stable/unvandalised versions will certainly be a great asset to Wikipedia in general, and to this project in particular. My personal preference would be to wait for Brion's software upgrade, but Messedrocker may be right - we have waited in vain for such things in the past. I have doubts about the scalability of this approach, but I'd love to be proved wrong. 57 so far looks like a good start to me, so maybe it can scale! I have the following suggestions:
  1. I think it would be better to revamp the existing WP:STABLE project, rather than trying to create a separate new one with the same goals. If you reactivate the existing page, you will find a lot of people (including myself) have it on their watchlists - some of those will come out and help if someone takes the initiative in getting things going. By all means adjust the goals, etc. of that page to fit your own approach - the project is considered inactive anyway. Whatever happens, though, you are probably going to have to be in the driving seat of the project for at least a year - tagging a lot of articles yourself - in order to convince the community that the project works, and that it is worth giving up other wikiwork for.
  2. If you want a group of articles to start looking at, I think you need look no further than Version 0.5, because most of those articles will form the core of all future offline releases, and because it represents many of the most important and/or best articles on Wikipedia. Remember that offline releases need this more than online - there in no rv possible, you're stuck with 10,000 CDs that all have "David is gay" inserted in the article on tellurium.
  3. If you want to bring the project into the Wikipedia 1.0 "stable" I think it would be very welcome - it certainly fits with our mission. We can at least include it in the navigation template, as a minimum.
  4. I'd urge you to consider how the project could be scalable - even to (say) a 1000-5000/year, and how the project could allow us to hit the ground running when/if the software upgrade comes through. In other words, if you can set up a network of "stable versions" people tagging articles now, those same people can be in the vanguard when the new system arrives.
Does this sound like a plan? Walkerma 05:26, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Hell yes it sounds like a plan! You have thought it out the most here, out of anyone. I'll get to work. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 11:58, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hi there

HI, new to this conversation, but was wondering if anyone had a reasonable idea of how big (storage wise) wikipedia is and what kind of media would be suitable to contain it on, peace Basejumper123 21:57, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

that depends on what you want. LossIsNotMore 23:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Release version : "outside the scope"

Could there be a page set up for the held nominations or is this a thing we try to avoid for the release version?? If so, I will keep these type of pages on my user page. Lincher 12:26, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

The original idea was that the held nominations page would be a "rolling" page. In other words, now that Version 0.5 is completed and 0.7 is starting:
  • Everything on the V0.5 held page is automatically nominated for Version 0.7.
  • The held noms page then becomes the location for articles held from Version 0.7 nominations. It should probably be renamed as "Release Version/Held nominations" to be consistent with the other pages. Walkerma 17:19, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the come back ... also, it would be nice to go ahead and have the bot pick up on the work we have done for V0.7/Release version. Lincher 20:43, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Now set up. Mathbot should pick up the categories in about 24 hours, then start listing articles a few hours later. Walkerma 06:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
By the way, I notice when people are digging these out of the "held" page for renomination (thanks for that!) they are including the reasons why they were rejected for V0.5. It seems to me this only serves to prejudice the reviewer! I think it would be better just to say, "Was held for V0.5" then let the reviewer decide if it's OK for Version 0.7. Another comment - some articles were initially held from Version 0.5, then added later into Version 0.5 when the rules changed. I think some listed as "Held" may in fact already be listed as passed! Walkerma 06:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
My view on it, is that we could, in fact, hold articles in a way that those don't meet the requirements of WP's guideline for example needs cleanup, not NPOV, seems like original research and so on.
Thanks for the bot glitch.
On another note, I am working on a list in my User:Lincher/Sandbox which will bring articles into WP:WPRV and also show the borderline articles and some other articles that have been assessed but won't meet the requirements (which will be dumped into the held nominations' page). Lincher 06:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I'd just seen some of the articles, noticing a lot beginning with A! Where did the list come from? Shouldn't some of these be nominated first? I know that capital cities like Lusaka and states like Alabama are OK (capitals and US states were agreed upon before), but surely things like Amateur astronomy (which are not obviously a "pass") need a second opinion? Or are these renominations? Walkerma 06:42, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

(no indent) These come from the WP:CONCISE (which has about 9000 articles) list. I'm working on the A's for now. When I know they are of top/high/high-mid importance, I add them, if not I leave them there but I rate them. Finally, the indented ones are the "not-so-sure" if we should include and the * ones will be included.

I think that way, the reviewing will go much faster and we wont have to wait for people that add to the RV Nomination (which is somewhat weak as of now), which is taken care of by Eyu100. Lincher 16:10, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, but we still need to agree that we want all of these articles to be included - and if so, what criteria are to be used in judging this? All of the Vital articles are to be included by consensus, but there hasn't been any discussion on including WP:CONCISE. One concern would be that we may end up with an encyclopedia that has 5000 articles for letters A-M, and only 1000 articles for letters N-Z! Also, that page is not very active as far as I know - for inactive read unbalanced- so how do we know (for example) that it doesn't include 50 baseball players from someone's favourite team, but none from other teams? If we are going to rely on SilverStar's personal picks, then we may as well just pick our own without any reviewing! I really think we need some more oversight. Walkerma 17:53, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I just peeked into WP:CONCISE and jumped to the 'F's. I found Frungy and Futurology. Irk. JoeSmack Talk 17:59, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I was part of the creation of this list ... this list, as of now is somewhat Western-world oriented which means that there is a need to include more stuff from other areas.
For you other point: 1) I only include about 10% of the list (meaning 900 articles ... that sound really vital).
2) I add articles only if they are part of high importance in major fields (phil/relig/sci/etc...)
3) I indent articles that I'm not sure of their quality/importance which we should discuss and consider to include in the version or not.
4) I Rate almost all articles on that list so that they might be used by the different projects or that they might be later used by the v1.0 project.
5) I try to be as objective as possible and in that regard, will mostly add only really important stuff. Also, I help myself of different outside the project lists to figure out what is important for each field. Lincher 18:03, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

(to answer Joe) I know the list is somewhat plagued by additions people have made though if you prune carefully the less important stuff, there is a decent list of articles that needs to be included, that will probably not have by the WVWP as of now. Lincher 18:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Quick update on Version 0.5

I've been busy on the phone and email recently, but also busy at work so this will be brief (for once!).

  1. Linterweb in France does now have a working (if buggy) test version of their reader software - this should be fine for our release. It should be ready in a month or so. This means we will miss our goal of publishing the CD before Christmas, but it's better to get it working properly - and we will have lots of checking to do anyway. It will sell fpr 10 Euros (1.5 to WMF).
  2. I spoke with User:Anthere and Brad Patrick (lawyer) from the Wikimedia Foundation, there are no road blocks there so we can go ahead. The only involvement of the WMF is to allow use of the Globe logo on the CDs.
  3. BozMo is running scripts on the collection, and helping out. Walkerma 18:00, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Is a torrent of the CD a no-no if it is being sold as well? JoeSmack Talk 18:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It will of course be available for FREE download, including via Torrent, and the reader software should even be included in that. That's the reality for anyone working with us, and they realise that. The only version that won't be available is paper, we're holding off on that until we get more expertise. Walkerma 22:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Navigation template

I have changed the navigation template to reflect what we are working on at the moment, if you feel that anything needs to be changed feel free to do so. I have been bold in updating and I hope I don't make anybody angry. Good day,Lincher 13:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

No, I was going to update that myself this weekend if no one else did - so thank you for saving me the trouble! I'll fix a couple of minor things I noticed. Also, I thought I knew all of the pages, I never knew about (or forgot about?) the Core 1000 page - how does that differ from Vital articles? Which set is better for us to use? I'd be a lot happier with us tagging those pages rather than the WP:CONCISE, since we did have a consensus to include all the Vital articles in Version 0.7. Thanks again, Walkerma 15:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know where it comes from though it was present in the former version of the template for which it was named Suggest for nom (or something like that???), I just gave it its original name. Lincher 16:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
As for the big listings and everything (WP:VA, WP:CONCISE, WP:CORE1000, WP:WVWP, etc.), the way I envision the current V0.7 release is that we will have plenty of time to review all of these. The big picture actually means that we will have more around 10k articles or more. The only fiasco I would oversee is having articles on the CD/DVD that were only assessed by the 1.0 team thus, maybe, giving out a CD/DVD with articles that might not have been well reviewed and possibly plagued with mistakes, with vandalism, with NPOV.
I now have a bit of time on my hand to work on making big lists and working on the core topics with access to facts on file website or biographical sites or others. I will also help to coordinate stuff (as Eyu100 see fits) but mostly help in assessing and adding articles to the release version. Lincher 16:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
That's wonderful! I see already that you have done some fantastic work on getting lists and even assessments on cities and provinces, I for one really appreciate the hours of work involved in doing all that. That "Suggest for nom" list (aka Core 1000?) was (I believe) originally a fork from Vital Articles, and we should see if the two lists are still similar. I would suggest that we use that Core 1000 as a crossing out list just like we did at the Version 0.5 Biography review, and add in anything from Vital Articles we see fit. If we could get all of the Core Supplement and Core1000/Vital Articles reviewed, that give us a really solid foundation of important material.
Regarding provinces and cities, I think we should limit ourselves somewhat at first, since we can't realistically check every city and province in Azerbaijan. In my proposal before we started V0.7, which seemed to be accepted by most, I said: "I'd also like to see a states & provinces page covering Australia, Canada, USA, India, South Africa, China and perhaps Germany and some Anglophone countries I've missed (but UK counties, French departments etc are a bit small for this release, IMHO)." I think we should focus on those first, then we can do counties of England/provinces of Zambia/Prefectures of Japan, etc only if we have time. If I can add to my original list, I'd probably include States of Malaysia, Regions of Brazil, Provinces of Indonesia and perhaps States of Nigeria. Malaysia is a strong case, I know from my stamp collecting that stamps from Malaysia actually have different issues for the different states because they are semi-autonomous, and English is widely used in Malaysia. So let's start with these most important, rather than simply trying to work alphabetically then find that V0.7 ends up having provinces of Afghanistan, Åland but nothing from India or South Africa. Once again, THANK YOU for all of your hard work! Walkerma 16:47, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Good, I'll work on that in the coming days. This thus will examplify our work in the field of Geography though with only Core 1000/Vital articles we are missing basic concepts coming from many disciplines. Would you care in directing me toward such compendium of useful articles in fields we probably do not know about (psychology, sociology, law, criminology and so on). Lincher 16:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I think those will need to come from WP:WVWP and MartinbotII, as well as set nominations. I will also try to dig up some ideas - for example on law, this "Top 20"would make a good set nomination (we already have 2 of them, in V0.5). Walkerma 21:15, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WP:WVWP

The number of articles marked seems to be dropping rapidly. Does anybody know what is going on? I saw on a talk page a while ago that the bot was mass blanking articles. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:06, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the discussion was about the hypothetical nightmare scenario where the bot might do that (extremely unlikely!) - Oleg is starting nightly backups just in case, and writing an "antidote" script. The only blanking was of one log, probably because the system limits were exceeded. The actual problem is only with one listing - the WP:Biography list, which is absolutely huge (145,000 articles). The bot is not counting all of the B-Class or Start-Class articles for some reason, and no one can work out why. Till we know why, or Oleg can fix it, the nightly bot runs are not taking place. See this discussion for updates. Walkerma 05:34, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually, on reflection even the nightmare scenario is much less scary than that, it's just blanking of the bot's output. Anyway, Oleg has pinned things down to a problem with the Biography project, and he's just restarted the bot. Hooray! We should see our first update of WP:WPRV listings by tomorrow. Walkerma 05:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Who Profits?

Who would profit from a CD version of the free online wikipedia? Jeepday 14:10, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I suppose anyone who was interested in producing it and then charging people for it. Although the Wikipedia-CD should not really be made for the purpose of profit, but rather for something along the lines of Wikimedia's non-profit mission. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 14:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Mainly people who don't have good internet access (I only got access at home one year ago, and I live in the US!)! Most people active here are obviously people with internet access, who tend to forget that much of the world doesn't have easy access 24 hours a day! The earlier CD has proved to be quite popular, and it was given away free to schools in Africa. Other people may just have dodgy internet access, or be on the road a lot. Easier than trying to find an internet cafe in a strange city, when you only want to know the capital city of Uganda. I think it's important for the world's no. 1 reference website be available in more than one medium.
The new German DVD release is currently ranked #40 by Amazon, and one of their earlier releases reached #1, so clearly there is a market. Our publisher is only planning on producing 2000-10,000 CDs, but that's only for an alpha test; I'd expect Version 1.0 (on DVD) to sell in the millions. Walkerma 15:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BozMo's first cut

User:BozMo has come out with a first cut (see User_talk:Walkerma) - I have a couple of comments.

  • Well done!
  • Categories are not there yet - I think they should be. It greatly eases navigation.
  • The 0.5 version is about 515 Meg - a good size for a CD. Pictures are 392Meg of that.
  • BozMo's web link works great - however a downloaded copy does not format correctly - I think I am missing some CSS magic.
  • pictures have been renamed - to 12823.jpg from Nelson_Mandela.jpg - I prefer the original names.
  • I will see if I can come up with a ksearch-client-side javascript search.

Wizzy…☎ 10:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds great! Pascal's first version is at [2], please compare the two and give feedback. In the meantime, I have so far written navigation pages for countries of the world and for some categories - Arts, Language & Literature, Philosophy and Religion and Everyday Life. I hope to finish up the ten categories, and also to expand the country info into subpages that give more detail for each country (such as presidents, cities, etc.). You can also follow things at WP:V0.5TD. Thanks, Walkerma 16:22, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
The first of the more detailed country trees is available at Wikipedia:Version 0.5/AsiaTree, this aims to list all articles in V0.5 that are closely related to each particular country. Feedback is welcome.
Also, the Polish offline reader is now available with English documentation at m:WikiBrowser. Walkerma 17:10, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Persondata

Hello, I was wondering if PersonData would be used in any form in an upcoming release. Thanks and keep up the good work. :-) 70.104.16.182 22:09, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

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