Wikipedia talk:Spotlight

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[edit] Some considerations...

  • Do we work on one article to completion, or do we work on one article up to a set limit of time?
  • What criteria should we use in determining what articles to spotlight?

- Stephanie Daugherty (Triona) - Talk - Comment - 20:33, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Meta-tasks

Here's a bunch of meta-stuff about the spotlight project to be considered:

  • Turnaround - how often do we want to switch articles?
  • Recruitment - how many collaborators do we need and how to attract them?
  • Choice of topics - should they be easily researchable so that a visible impact can be made in short time, or should they be hard topics, so that we improve articles which are not likely to be improved otherwise?
  • Scope - should we choose red links and stubs or poorly written articles of decent size, and should we try to make them just decent, or to make them good or featured articles?
  • Workflow - how to achieve the most with the least effort and time expended

Here's my view: We're doing this on IRC and we should adapt to the medium, which is fast-paced and immediate. That means relatively short turn-around, maybe a day or two, maybe less, which would necessitate that we work on easily researchable topics and that we don't try to get articles to FA. That's a good thing, IMO, because wiki is a better format than IRC for hard topics and slow work, and we already have FA drive. A relatively large output of material of decent quality would also be good for recruitment of new collaborators, as well as for the moral of existing ones. A few more links around the project space, and a template to put on the talk page of the selected article would also be useful.

As for the workflow, I once started work on User:Zocky/Article checklist (and never finished it). We may need something like that to guide the work in useful directions. Also, the relatively massive real-time collaboration carries risks of duplication of effort, as we experienced yesterday more than once. In the future, we may get a smarter bot on which you'll be able to "claim" tasks, but in the meantime, we should get into the habit of announcing what we're doing on the channel. Zocky | picture popups 15:19, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

My thoughts on this:
  • Turnaround: One article per day seems good; I say we stick with that for a while and see how we go.
  • Recruitment: I've posted a notice at the Community Portal, that should get the attention of most potentially interested editors.
  • Scope: I'm not entirely sure about starting new articles, it's not quite the same as expanding something that's already there, and we have so many articles now I get the feeling that most things that deserve articles have them, even if they're not very good. But if we find a good topic, then I don't see why not.
  • Workflow: We're entering new territory here, we're going to have to think of this as we go along. I think the very fact that we're able to talk in real-time already reduced the time expended significantly; as for effort, that remains to be seen – Gurch 03:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
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