Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Current events

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[edit] Sub-Article Merges

All of the regional articles in the {{Current events articles}} template need to be merged. They are all very short articles that aren't updated often. Perhaps they can be merged into one page entitled Regional current events or National current events. Then, like with the current Current events in Malaysia and Singapore article, we could possibly use flags to help denote the countries in which current events occur:

  • Some event occuring.

Just a suggestion. However, as it is now there are far too many unnecessary articles. joturner 02:23, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I disagree about merging everything. I'd however agree to a regional's current events page, i.e. for southeast asia, Msia+sg+thai+etc within Southeast Asia; for europe, africa, east asia, south east etc. In this way, it provides focus on a region. __earth (Talk) 02:38, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
I also disagree. Current events in Australia and New Zealand is updated about three times a week on average; I see 12 stories at April 2006 in Australia and New Zealand and 16 at March 2006 in Australia and New Zealand. There hasn't been a story in May yet, but this is the first day of the month. I have no objection to the inactive current events pages (where inactive means perhaps that there has been no update for a month) being removed from the {{Current events articles}} template so they remain as an archive should a new and keen maintainer comes along to restart them. Merger of some pages may help as well. If we extended the Australia and New Zealand page to cover all of Oceania, then the dozen or so stories covered by Portal:Oceania each month would be added to that page. However I did suggest that some months ago (at Talk:Current events in Australia and New Zealand, and no one responded.-gadfium 03:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps by continent would work better? Maybe "the Americas", "Europe", "Africa", "Asia", and "Oceania"? joturner 04:00, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Continent is good but for continent like Asia, I think it's better to subdivide into subregion. Again, I would support Malaysia+Singapore and Thailand's current events pages into Southeast Asia current events. I would oppose effort to integrate Malaysia+Singapore into one big Asia page. __earth (Talk) 05:09, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
What would be considered an adequate level of activity? Would this be measured in posts per month, or perhaps also in number of regular contributors?-gadfium 05:32, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I am also opposed to any merger of active events pages. The current events in Australia and New Zealand forms the basis for the "Years in Australia/New Zealand" series.--cj | talk 09:43, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I am also opposed to this merger suggestion. This merger proposal needs to be thought through at a more granular level. For example, merging Chinese current events with Current events in Hong Kong and Macao might help both groups, but other groups, such as Current events in Australia and New Zealand seem to be achieving critical mass. Jonathan O'Donnell 19:49, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

This wouldn't work. There are many, many example of current events that are highly significant to residents of a particular country but that residents of neighboring countries have never heard of. Local politics, local celebrities, etc. are often known only locally. If regional pages were created, they should be in addition to rather than instead of country pages. -- Curps 04:51, 5 May 2006 (UTC)


Could someone who knows how please place the merge tag on British and Irish current events, Indian current events and possibly the List of current events articles by region. At the moment, it appears that the editors of Indian current events may not even be aware that you are suggesting merging their page with Pakistan current events. Jonathan O'Donnell 19:49, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

  • Oppose These pages need more focus, not less. ReeseM 01:13, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Agreed. If people want to write to this level of detail about the news, it should go in WikiNews, not on a myriad of Wikipedia pages. Viva la mergismo!--M@rēino 22:12, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose I just noticed the flag slapped to Indian current events. Do you call this April 2006 in India and this March_2006_in_India not updated often? As a encyclopedia, we should store a timeline of news events with wiki-links to the actual articles. Wikinews has a different purpose to report news as it happens. Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 22:59, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
I have just noticed that Current events in Hong Kong and Macao was made a redirection to Current events in East Asia as a result of a merge. Seeing that the discussion here has yielded no consensus, I have reverted that particular edit at Current events in Hong Kong and Macao, and this is to let you know as courtesy. In lieu of consensus here and at the respective pages, I would suggest keeping the pages as they are now until we can form a consensus the next time. --Pkchan 16:37, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
As you wish. The discussion was quite stagnant before. joturner 16:41, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
Well actually, I commented on Pkchan's talk page. joturner 16:44, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
In reply to joturner: I do not have any particular problem with the merger; I just think that due process should be observed, and if a merger has been proposed but no consensus can be formed, we should respect that and the status quo and wait till a better timing to re-propose the merger.
I do recognise that Current events in Hong Kong and Macao has been a poorly maintained page; I'll try to raise this issue to the attention of the fellow editors at Wikipedia:HK wikipedians' notice board and hopefully will re-ignite their interest here. If this comes to no result I'll propose a merger/deletion as appropriate. --Pkchan 16:53, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
That sounds fine; I posted information about the proposed merger on Community Portal to no avail. Any attempt to get more discussion regarding the merger(s) would be appreciated. joturner 17:10, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I have changed my view. I now believe the regional pages should be merged into Portal:Current events. I used the example of Current events in Australia and New Zealand as an example of a successful regional page before. This has expanded to become Portal:Current events/Oceania, but the quality of coverage of Australian events has dropped. Very few editors apart from myself contribute stories to it. Most of the other regional news pages are in worse shape.-gadfium 05:47, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Project Objectives

[edit] Ordering dates

  • Ordering dates of the months in forward chronological order (suggested by GT)

I think this idea should be considered, although it would take quite a bit of (hu)manpower to update all the past monthly articles to fit this standard. joturner 01:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

This would be pretty easy actually, given that all of Jan2003-Dec2005 are templated, it's just a question of reordering the template transclusions - easy for a human or a bot. I agree with GT that we should go for the natural order rather than backwards. Pcb21 Pete 10:33, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Done for 2003-to date. Pcb21 Pete 08:52, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Wow; I didn't realize it would be that quick. joturner 10:30, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
2002 is done so the whole thing is complete. Thanks again Pete! GT 05:35, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I spoke too soon. Deaths in March 2006, et al all have the same problem, as well as the list of deaths on each monthly page. Argh. GT 06:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Yuck! You are right further down the page, however we want to re-org things, we want to avoid double listing problems, particularly when the double listings are on separate pages. Pcb21 Pete 07:19, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merging sub-articles

[edit] Receiving context

[edit] International interest

  • Ensuring news items of international interest are included

[edit] Eliminate templates

This one has really bothered me. Every day for quite a few years, until the practice was stopped a few months ago, is archived using articles for individual dates. Those individual dates are then included in the monthly articles. joturner 01:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi Jo. Thanks for your note on my talk page. Out of interest why does this bother you? I have quite a few ideas for turning current events into a really useful page - but it would actually involve making more of this day pages - but useful ones rather than dumb inclusions. To help me put together a proposal, could you tell me what is the bothering bit, thanks. Pcb21 Pete 10:31, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Actually, it's really the pointlessness that bothers me (although I may have exaggerated this a bit). I still can't figured out why someone decided to archive the months that way in the first place. If you have an idea to make those templates, and the archive pages in general, more useful, I'd be glad to here what you have in mind. joturner 20:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
My take is that it is a half-finished job. A serious problem at the moment is that we link to dates in the format Month Day and Year. These links are pretty useless in my view because a) they have to cover such a massive amount of data that they never give any context to the date where you have just come from b) Whatlinkshere is useless (each page has thousands and in some case hundreds of thousands of incoming links).
A way of solving the issue is, for dates for which we have lots of information i.e. 2003-onwards, to link to single dates such as Month Day, Year. Hence creating those pages. So they are not pointless. But they are not that great. I think we could really improve Wikipedia by
a) merging all the current events pages (i.e. current events, current events in the UK, current events in Africa) etc into one.
b) this makes the amount of data for each date larger, but more structured.
c) so instead of doing this awkward template transclusion into Month Year, Month Year becomes an overview of the month, picking out most important events, and linking to all the day subpages.
d) Each single date page Month Day, Year has links to Month Year, Month Day and Year so all other material is just a click away
e) Another happy result is that Wikipedia automatically builds a Year Book as found in all other major encyclopedias, so we stop being deficient there
f) We can start being cleverer about using Wikinews.
Ideally I will have done a good selling job on how we can improve massively on the current system as it solves the date-linking AND current events AND template confusion issues in one go. What do you think? Pcb21 Pete 07:21, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Interesting ideas about turning the monthly pages into records of the most notable events. The only problem is that it's an additional burden to have to maintain separate pages like that, especially when it comes to making sure certain events appear on not just one but both lists. Without committed maintainers the whole thing would be a disaster. Also, who decides what is important enough to list on the monthly page? That is a potential headache. But if you did want to just select a small number of key events during a month there's no reason they couldn't just go at the top of the page in some sort of "Most important events" section.
I won't give up on your idea but my preference would be to keep things the way they're done now, create redirects corresponding with every date (March 19, 2006) to the day's entry on the month page (March 2006#19 March 2006), and then just refer to dates as such: "On March 19, 2006, the president announced...". Often the year is an important enough context to deserve its own link separate from the day and in many cases that year link is to something specialized like 2006 in music and that's something we'd lose by just linking to the date in full. GT 05:56, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Avoid duplication

If you look at (for example) February 16 and February 2006, you see a lot of overlap, which is what happened on February 16, 2006. This information is created, sourced, corrected and updated (or not) separately, inevitably with the result that some major events are only listed by month+day or by month+year. And then there are the years like 2006. For example, February 16 lists no events at all for 2006, 2006 lists one event for February 16 (Kobe Airport opens), and February 2006 has ten events for February 16, but not the opening of Kobe. If that was the most significant event on that date, then February 2006 is really off. But if it is less important than the other ten listed on February 2006, then 2006 has a strange choice. And I'm pretty sure that some of the February 16, 2006 events are more notable than many of those listed by February 16 for other years.

So a possible objective might be to avoid such duplicating overlap. That would probably mean embracing templates wholesale, such as was done for January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2005. Using "<noinclude>...</noinclude>" with a suitable text the risk might be avoided that these are taken for independent articles, like happened to June 1, 2003. Actually, they could live in Template: space. Or perhaps some space newly created for this purpose. Just an idea. LambiamTalk 20:58, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I was never really fond of that inclusion for 2003-2005. However, I do see the inconsistency between the year, month, and date articles. I think the February 16 article is correct in not having anything for 2006, but February 2006 is correct in being comprehensive. 2006 listing an event for February 16, however, is not good. I believe the date articles should contain the most important events of all-time that occured on that date, the year articles should contain the most important events of the year (and the most important events from the individual months), and the month articles should be comprehensive containing those events on the year and date pages and then some. joturner 04:15, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ending monthly archival

I just noticed something today that made me come around on the templates. Since today is May 1, the beginning of a month, Current events only contains events for that day. If we used templates it would be trivial to just leave the last few days of April up on that page, or even just all-out turn the Current events article into a page always consisting of the templates of the last (fixed number) days. Every night a person or a bot could stick the new day at the top and remove the oldest day. Furthermore the current monthly page would fill up as the individual day templates received entries during their presence on the Current events page and there would be no need to do any sort of change-over at the end of the month other than maybe switching the "List of deaths" template on Current events to that of the new month, and things of that sort. — GT 08:00, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I really like that idea; it doesn't really make sense that the current events page on April 30 is much longer than that on May 1 simply because it is late in the month. I add a notice on the current events talk page. joturner 03:54, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
I like the idea of not just archiving away all of the events at the start of a new month as the new month leaves us with nothing that happened yesterday. Robovski 00:47, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Add your new project objective here

[edit] Suggestions

It looks like you are interested in the monthly current events page and organizing things, but I also suggest working on stub news articles. In particular, Africa-related news items often are neglected. These would be good for the collaborations, for example the 2006 Horn of Africa food crisis article. I did a little bit of work there, when it was featured on "In the news", but it still needs major work. Several people working together to find more sources and details, and improving the article could go a long way. --Aude (talk | contribs) 02:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I added a section about improving current events articles onto the main WikiProject page. joturner 02:22, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. Any help to counter WP:BIAS with current events articles would be excellent. --Aude (talk | contribs) 03:31, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Current events portal

There is discussion about moving the Current events page to the portal namespace, Portal:Current events. Design changes to the current events page would be minimal, though open for discussion. To weigh in (along with rationale for the move), see Wikipedia:Portal/Proposals#Portal:Current events. --Aude (talk contribs) 01:52, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Since the proposal was accepted, I am hoping to have the switch take effect as of July 1 00:00 (UTC). Further discussions at Talk:Current events#Switch to Portal:Current events. Thanks—Kayaker 21:51, 30 June 2006 (UTC).
The Initial portal migration steps are complete. Let me know if I missed or mangled anything. Thanks—Kayaker (talk • contribs) 01:35, 1 July 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Project Directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council is currently in the process of developing a master directory of the existing WikiProjects to replace and update the existing Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. These WikiProjects are of vital importance in helping wikipedia achieve its goal of becoming truly encyclopedic. Please review the following pages:

  • User:Badbilltucker/Culture Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Culture Directory 2,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Philosophy and religion Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Sports Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Geographical Directory,
  • User:Badbilltucker/Geographical Directory/United States, (note: This page will be retitled to more accurately reflect its contents)
  • User:Badbilltucker/History and society directory, and
  • User:Badbilltucker/Science 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 to have the existing directory replaced by the updated and corrected version of the directory above by November 1. 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 22:14, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if you tried to update it before, and the corrections were gone. I have now moved the new draft in the old directory pages, so the links should work better. My apologies for any confusion this may have caused you. B2T2 14:01, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 17:41, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

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