Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Beer

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[edit] Falstaff Brewing Company

How is it possible that we don't even have an article for Falstaff Brewing Company. I think without getting into an arguement, we'd all agree that Falstaff was very, very important to the history of American brewing. Anyone willing to take up the torch for Falstaff? --Brownings 03:41, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

This grand injustice *cough* has been rectified... I wrote the article and created a category. The article needs a lot of love, as I could really care less about Falstaff, St. Louis, or even beer. Have fun - its just too bad you couldn't slam one down while doing it. • Freechild'sup? 15:40, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Format of main page

I may have bumped into a few of you on here and as such you may know I work extensively on WikiProject Food and Drink which is the parent project to this one. As such, I have in an attempt to revive some of the other projects which have softened by revamping their main pages and adding subsidiary pages for better organization and appeal. Now this project has a large following and doesn't necessarily at this point need appeal for new members, but it can never hurt. It will also give the page an ease of use for places to click and get templates along with info on merge proposals, deletion proposals, and other information on the project.

As this project is very active I wanted to talk here first about helping the project by putting it along the format which WikiProject Food and Drink, Wikiproject Wine, WikiProject Foodservice and WikiProject Cheeses are currently under. I'm still finalizing Foodservice and I am offering the same to the remaining projects under Food and Drink as well. Please take a look at the other pages and tell me what you think when you get a chance.--Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC 03:00, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Christopher, I've seen the work you've done around and it's really terrific. I think our main page could use a bit of a refresh, but I would like to maintain its current character. I think we can work on updating a few areas, and improving the visuals, while maintaining the current feel and most of the current content.
Of course, I would like to hear what everyone else here has to say about any changes before going ahead with a big overhaul. If there's a good consensus, then it'd be great to have you work with us on improving our welcome screen. Cheers! --Daniel11 07:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
The content would remain the same,WikiProject Food and Drink was a major edit some time ago, but there is much more content on your project here than there was back when I got involved with the food and drink project. If you look at the WikiProject Cheeses and WikiProject Foodservice, I mostly just added templates and headings, which you actually already have, just organizing the templates to one area would help out editors for quick access and having the right panel with quick access info and templates helps as well.--Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC 07:22, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

As there were no objections I updated the main page, let me know what you think.--Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC 22:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm cool. It looks good. SilkTork *SilkyTalk 19:50, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
If SilkTork likes it, then I like it. I do think it looks really nice, although this means there's now some new content that we have to create, and we've already got a ton of unfinished stuff. Thanks a lot! --Daniel11 06:03, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Not a problem, once I get some other stuff cleared up I can help creating those new pages for the project. I was also wondering if you guys were interested in having assessment capability for your discussion tags? I just created them for WikiProject Cheeses and as I know you have significantly more articles to your credit, I thought perhaps this would be a good tracking device for you. Let me know what you think, it will take me a little bit to do it, but I sincerely don't mind. I think it would improve the project viability and quality greatly.--Chef Christopher Allen Tanner, CCC 19:33, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Assessment stuff would be terrific. I wanted to do that myself a little while ago but never got around to figuring out how. Your very generous offer to create some of the new project pages and the assessment capability would be most welcome, and I think that once the templates or whatever for assessment are set up then I and undoubtedly some other Beer Project members will eagerly help go through all the articles. I agree that it would be a vast improvement for the project. Thanks again for your help thus far, and any future contributions would be icing on the cake. Cheers! --Daniel11 02:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I love so much that projects are adopting my design! :) I originally created this for WP:MCB. I have to say, though, would you guys mind much if I changed the color scheme a bit to be more in line with our "beerishness"? – ClockworkSoul 16:44, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Hey, I told you it was a nice design! Obviously feel free to change the colors to something beerier, I'd actually sort of wondered whether someone might do that for a while. Great to see you around these parts again! --Daniel11 (talk) 07:12, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes, you did! I'm back on the beer thing. I've been brewing, and now I'm borderline obsessed. I just bottled a nice cream stout tonight. Yum, yum! – ClockworkSoul 07:28, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Sounds delicious. I've never brewed but I guess I should. By the way, one other thing re the template, I actually originally thought it might've been a somewhat off attempt at beer colors, but knowing that you originally designed it for MCB explains all. Bottoms up! --Daniel11 (talk) 07:36, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

<outdent> Which template do you mean? I was thinking of using similar colors to the one I used in the brewboxen, which I had long ago also used to create my user page. – ClockworkSoul 07:42, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Hm, I guess what they say about beer and memory must be true. :) I wasn't looking at the template as I wrote about it, but going from memory, and I had a different thing in mind. Anyway, I was referring to {{Beer}}, which I believe is the relevant one. Anyway, I like the brewboxen colors (which I shamelessly stole for the navboxen), and I noticed you'd used the same for your user page. At any rate, I guess I've lost track a bit of the various schemes in use previously and in the present, but I like the ones on your user page and I trust your judgment in applying colors to whatever template we're actually talking about. :) --Daniel11 (talk) 09:18, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Ah - yes, I did make that one too! You have a good memory if you remember that I also designed the standard talk page templates. The funny thing is that I modified those colors from the ones I used for the beer project. Truly, we have changed the world! – ClockworkSoul 15:34, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
The revolution has begun... --Daniel11 (talk) 23:31, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Looks very good - definitely a beerier color scheme, and much easier on the eyes.

By the way I noticed that somebody cleared the lighter background shade from the brewery brewbox (unless that's another memory thing...). Is the paler color still supposed to be there? I notice it's still there for the beer beerbox. On which subject, I've been wondering: is it appropriate to use the beer beerbox within a brewery page, say in a section about that particular beer? Or is it only meant to sit at the top of an article about a beer itself? --Daniel11 (talk) 23:31, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Beer Template

I created a beer template for beers within the context of a brewery article. I was working on updating the Great Lakes Brewing Company article and got annoyed with the format so I came up with {{User:DavidJ710/Template:Beer}}. Let me know what you think, and please feel free to update it with anything you like. If you think this is unnecessary, please discuss, and I'll revert my format changes, but I think this could be useful, especially with some more attention from all of you! DavidJ710| talk 21:16, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

While this might be nice on a company website, I don't know if the show/hide for the awards is very wikipedia like. What do others think?
Yukata Ninja (talk) 15:56, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Ok, that is one of the things I was worried about. I have been on the fence as to whether or not that adds notability to the beers/brewery. I added the show/hide for that reason, it doesn't clutter up the page and if you are interested you can see them easily. Is there a way to include this information in a more suitable way, or is this something that should be omitted from the encyclopedia?  DavidJ710  talk  19:18, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd say make a note that it has won awards at certain competitions but omit the details, instead link to that competition (ie GABF). On the competition page they can have separate list pages that show winners, etc. Yukata Ninja (talk) 19:46, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Beer in O'Reilly's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

WikiProject Beer makes an appearance in O'Reilly Media's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in a chapter about WikiProjects. You can view a preview of the chapter, including a nice screenshot, here, by opening the WikiProjects section in Chapter 9 (I couldn't find a direct link to the section in question). Congratulations to all WikiProject Beer members.

Thanks to author John Broughton for the mention. It looks like a good book! --Daniel11 (talk) 03:29, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Where WikiProject Beer had been making great strides at adding and improving beer-related articles through about summer 2006, since then it has stagnated if not regressed. Am I the only one who finds it ironic that out of all the WikiProjects that could have been featured in such a work, they happened to choose this one? --Mwalimu59 (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
If you'd like to see the project improve, or improve at a faster rate, then the best way is to make those improvements yourself. Do you have any specific concerns? It seems to me like most if not all the members have moved beyond the sometimes uncivil arguments over what belongs in articles, and continued making (quiet) strides in improving the beer articles and the WikiProject infrastructure. It's true that there definitely remain vast areas that need to be filled in and improved, and many people don't have time to contribute at a steady pace so that there are faster and slower periods. We can always revisit any specific recommendations or standards if anyone's unhappy over their previous resolution, although hopefully in a calmer manner. Again, if you feel that this project has somehow stagnated or regressed but are still interested in its scope, then please bring up any specific areas that you're unhappy with, or make more detailed remarks about the broader, more general failures you see, and of course you're also encouraged to make any changes that would improve those areas yourself.
Besides, maybe they chose to use this one knowing it could use a bit of lovin'! --Daniel11 (talk) 07:39, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
I sat on this and had to think for a while before deciding how to respond. A lot of the suggestions you are making are the same sort of thing I might say myself to a newer contributor who was getting frustrated at the process. In fact I probably have. Ideally, contributors work through their differences of opinion and come to some sort of consensus on what belongs in the articles.
Unfortunately what I see happening is that we have a handful of key participants in WikiProject Beer who "know they're right", no matter how many others disagree with them, who don't care how stubborn or obnoxious they have to be to other participants to get their way. I have made improvements to articles, only to have them stomped on by said individuals. One individual in particular (I won't mention any names but I'll bet many readers know who I'm talking about) has frequently gutted articles of content and revert others' good faith edits, often characterizing them as crap, vandalism, nonsense, and the like, terms normally reserved for truly bad faith edits. He's mocked others in his comments and is quick to accuse others of breaking the rules even when he is just barely within them himself. On Wikipedia there's always the risk that something you spend a lot of time on to improve an article won't pass muster and will get removed or heavily altered, but on this project that risk got to be too great to be worth the time. I started contributing to WikiProject Beer because I love beer, and I had to stop contributing to it because my experiences trying to contribute here were tainting and diminishing my love of beer. At one point the individual I was referring to left for several weeks, but he's back and as recently as this past week is still up to his old tricks. I don't really see myself returning in any significant capacity unless he seriously cleans up his act or leaves for good. And until then I shall regard beer related articles on Wikipedia as potentially biased or incomplete and to be taken with a grain of salt. "Salt in my beer." Yep, I'd say that's an apt description.
Having said that, I do appreciate your efforts and those of several others here toward continuing to improve the articles here on beer despite the atmosphere, and it is with no small amount of regret that I have had to step away from it for the sake of my own sanity. --Mwalimu59 (talk) 16:19, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Requested article

Requested article (why is there no "requested articles" section in this project, unlike all others?): Sour ale (currently redirects to Beer style). Badagnani (talk) 05:42, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

The general section for listing articles that people would like to request assistance with got moved over to the WikiProject Beer collaboration page, although we haven't really had enough ongoing interest in the collaboration to keep it current. You could add a requested articles section to this project, or you can use the collaboration page and try to whip it into better shape, and maybe draw some more attention to it. The latter might require some extra work, although if you feel like doing that it would be greatly appreciated! --Daniel11 (talk) 07:46, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup and Citations

Hey everyone, I'm asking the Beer Project to try to help cleanup and cite the last few articles in this contribution history [2]. The editor is rather... passionate... about the article for Emerald Coast Beer Company and was recently blocked for sticking an AfD tag on several other brewery articles. I attempted to start a citation effort on the list with Diamond Bear Brewing Company and Rio Salado Brewing Company but I don't really have the will to do more than research one at a time and only every so often. If the Beer Project could get involved in the citation clean-up it would greatly decrease the odds of these breweries ending up at AfD in the future.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 16:29, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Importance standardization

Hello, all. I've been developing Igor lately, and have finally gotten to see all of our articles and their assigned importances and whatnot in one place. Right now, they're a little inconsistent, so I'm trying to standardize them a bit. This is what I'm setting for now:

  • Beer styles and other core topics: Top importance.
  • Glassware like pint glass and pilsner glass: High to mid importance
  • Beers of (country/continent/nation): High importance.
  • Lists: From high (list of breweries) to low (list of Ukrainian beer).
  • Individual breweries: I'm not touching right now, but I'm thinking that the five or so giants should be top, ranging all the way down to low for the little local guys. We should come up with a definition of what defines a top brewery vs. a mid vs. a low, though.

What do you folks think? – ClockworkSoul 17:58, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I pretty strongly agree with your proposed categorizations.
I'd also like to add a few comments/questions about Igor in general, I guess this isn't the ideal place but I hope you don't mind.
First of all, I think it's a really good idea, I'm sure it will encourage the rapid growth and improvement of existing projects, and spur the creation of new ones.
Is it Windows-only, or multi-platform? On a somewhat related note, would it make sense to incorporate it into any existing tools for use with WP?
Finally, a recommendation, in case you hadn't already thought of it: implementing the ability to browse existing WikiProjects, both for its own sake and in order to help someone classify a new project that one might be interested in creating.
Again, looks really good so far, and I'm in agreement re your proposed assessments.--Daniel11 (talk) 07:28, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Igor is a multi-platform application. It's written in Java and will be distributed as an executable JAR file, so (in theory) it should run on just about anything with a new enough JVM. I'm not sure of any tools that we would want to incorporate into it, at least not offhand. Did you have anything in mind? As for browsing WikiProjects, I'm not sure what you mean, exactly, but at the moment you can easily scan and see (and modify) the articles tagged for any of about 1200 WikiProjects and workgroups. Take a look over at the Igor page. Let me know what you think. If you have any other suggestions, you can post them right on the talk page. :) – ClockworkSoul 02:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Fine, I'll post further comments/questions in the appropriate place! --Daniel11 (talk) 02:33, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Beer at IBM Research

Here's another mention of WikiProject Beer. In a fancy paper on Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms, some IBM Research and MIT people make passing reference to us, though not exactly in the most flattering light...

Wikiprojects have distinctive social atmospheres. On “Wikiproject: Mathematics” a typical participant introduces himself with, “Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech, with a specialization in mathematical logic” while on “Wikiproject: Beer” a representative self-description reads only “mmm, beer.”

But seriously, it's an interesting paper. --Daniel11 (talk) 01:14, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

There's also a slightly different version here, looks like basically the same thing but without as many illustrations. --Daniel11 (talk) 01:28, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

"Mmm, beer". Not's not unflattering, it's just unstuffy. I'm an educated guy, but when I think of beer, I don't imagine (usually) the enzymes of fermentation decomposing glucose into pyruvate and ethanol with a net gain in ATP... I think "I like beer, beer good". The atmosphere here is different is all, and I'm reasonably sure that's all they were saying. It's a bit less academic, and that's a good thing. – ClockworkSoul 02:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Fair enough, I just found the contrast a bit stark, and thus funny, but you're right that it's not really unflattering. --Daniel11 (talk) 02:30, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh, it is stark, and I'm glad! Great article, Daniel. I was a good read, thanks! – ClockworkSoul 15:13, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mergers and stuff

I think we need to do more work on companies that have merged and bought each other. For example, I was looking for MacTarnahan's, a Portland brewery. Turns out MacTarnahan's and Portland Brewing Company were both bought by Pyramid, which was then bought by Magic Hat. None of the pages said anything like that. --AW (talk) 21:45, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Guidelines say that you should use the current name and upmerge the information. I think this is a good example why keeping old articles can be useful, or creating them if needed. After multiple merges, the history sections can be rather a mess. In the case of brewers, the fact that the brand may continue to be made, merges can be tricky. Yes, you can use redirects, but then someone still needs to add the information to the current article. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:07, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
So should I create a MacTarnahan's page? I wouldn't know where to stop. --AW (talk) 03:44, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
If they are notable yes. If someone ever feels the need to merge they can. Since it is now closed, using reliable sources with something like {{cite web}} would be critical. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:16, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
They still have a website and stuff though, which is odd. I'll just make it and see what happens. --AW (talk) 17:06, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Keg stand vs keg games

I've been doing a little work on keg stand, and another user decided to merge it into a new article called keg games. Personally, I think a keg stand is its own thing with plenty of references (try Googleing it), whereas keg games is kind of a nebulous term - is it a game involving beer from a keg? A game physically using the keg? I dunno. My suggestion is to have a section in keg with brief mention that there are games that use a keg with references. And if any of those games are notable enough, which I doubt, then make their own articles. Figured this was an organizational thing which would be good to talk to you all about. --AW (talk) 21:19, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you that "keg stand" is either worthy of its own article a section in a much larger drinking games article; honestly, I see no point in the continued existence of keg games, because keg stand is the only "keg game" even mentioned there and constitutes 85% of the entry. I'm wholly opposed to adding it to keg though. It's really just an amusing cultural item and really doesn't have much to do with defining and describing what a keg is, making its addition no better than slapping a "trivia" or "in popular culture" section onto an otherwise decent article. – ClockworkSoul 15:11, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Cool, sounds good. And about keg, if there are games involving it and they have sources, I don't see why they shouldn't be added. Most appear to be not very notable though.--AW (talk) 18:34, 3 June 2008 (UTC)