Wikipedia talk:WikiProject reform

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[edit] Organizations WikiProject

My initial two cents - a very interesting proposal. In the context of WP:ORGZ however, an interesting problem arises. There is no doubt a need for a coordinated approach to how we approach articles and categories of organizations. Currently, we are planning to use location as one of four main categorization schemes for our grass root approach to organizations. However, if I understand your proposal correctly, each of "Organizations by country/city/province/state" would be allocated as a task force within the geographical WikiProject for that area. I'm not against that idea per se`, but there would still need to be a central focal point of categorization to coordinate standardized infoboxes, categorization standards and problem areas.Oldsoul 21:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

That's where the bit about task forces jointly operated by multiple projects comes in. In this case, you'd have, for example, a "Organizations in Canada" task force that would be under both WikiProject Canada and WikiProject Organizations. Kirill Lokshin 21:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I think it's a great idea, particularly when it comes to the various state and national projects out there. The one major question I have would be determining the "task force" and "main project" levels. I can easily see all the projects for individual states becoming task forces of the WikiProject United States, but would, for example, the individual WikiProjects for France, Ireland, and Norway also become task forces of WikiProject Europe or something similar? And what would happen to their "child" projects? I guess my question is at what level the differentiation between task forces and main projects would take place. John Carter 21:49, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
On a practical level, I was assuming that the most obvious clustering would be to the country level (i.e. one project per country); that seems to be how most of the hierarchies are oriented. (You tend to have, e.g. Chinese history, Indian history, etc. projects, rather than Asian history.)
Obviously, this means that larger countries will have more articles and more task forces, but I don't really think that's going to be a problem. Kirill Lokshin 21:58, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question

Would WikiProject be forced to become task forces/subprojects/etc? Similar projects (c.f. WikiProject Tropical cyclones and WikiProject Meteorology for an example) have already rejected merge requests previously, so having something force the project together is not going to fly. Titoxd(?!?) 23:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's any way to force a project to do anything; I was intending that the consolidation be strongly encouraged, but the final course of action would be up to the people on the ground.
Having said that, two related points:
  • WP:TROP would only fall under the third consolidation category, which is really much more open to debate as far as the exact size needed to make a separate project worthwhile is concerned.
  • An adoption of some sort of project accreditation could have an indirect effect here; in other words, a group might be unable to get accredited as an independent project, and would therefore not get access to whatever the benefits of the system might be unless it merged into a larger, already accredited project.
Kirill Lokshin 23:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Just for clarification, would "accreditation" apply only to projects yet to be created, or would it apply retroactively to existing projects as well? John Carter 00:48, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Whatever we want it to be, presumably. Given the current glut of projects, I think it wouldn't be very useful if it didn't apply to existing projects, though. Kirill Lokshin 00:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
It wouldn't be helpful if it didn't apply to existing projects, I agree. How would it work? Titoxd(?!?) 02:27, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Technically speaking, TROP is already a subproject of Meteorology; however, it was formed before the "parent" project, and has a structure significantly more mature than Meteorology. Last time it was brought up, a merge was overwhelmingly rejected by both sides; the Meteorology users don't want to have to deal with the hyperactive little brother. Both communities (and topics) are quite different. Titoxd(?!?) 02:27, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I have an issue with these "extra powers"

Already, we far too often get Wikiprojects OWNing articles under their scope, to the point of canvassing all their members to vote a certain way in an AfD. And I was the only one to my knowledge who complained about it. I may be getting the wrong impression of what powers are intended, but if I'm not, I strongly oppose them. -Amarkov moo! 01:46, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I may be missing something obvious, but what "extra powers" are you referring to? I don't see that anywhere in the proposal. Kirill Lokshin 02:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
It's part of the accreditation section; "providing some additional privileges to that project". And then later allowing accredited projects "a greater role in various processes" is mentioned. -Amarkov moo! 03:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Ah, ok; three somewhat related responses, then:
  • The whole thing is pretty embryonic; there's no concrete proposal to give anyone anything at this point.
  • There's a distinction between priveledges and powers; the example I mostly focused on here—allowing accredited projects greater freedom in tagging talk pages—is fairly firmly in the former category, I think. What else an accreditation system might be applied to is entirely open to discussion (I honestly don't have any particularly good ideas at the moment); I merely thought it worthwhile to point out that, if we were to create some system that allows for community approval of WikiProjects (in whatever manner), we could find other uses for it beyond the tagging issue.
  • Finally: that entire proposal revolves around community-wide approval of a WikiProject; presumably the sort of behavior you point to would simply lead to the project not getting that approval, if the results were to be anything actually significant.
Kirill Lokshin 03:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
This probably doesn't address what you are actually asking, but It may be of some "comfort" to know.. I've seen some people try to use WikiProjects to vote stack, only to have it completely backfire :) -- Ned Scott 05:41, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
Projects I am engaged in do not do any vote stacking. Period. The projects I work in are concentrated on 1) assessment, and 2) ensuring that subjects in our scope are covered as much as possible. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 17:07, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The mechanics of taskforces

I've been meaning to ask how the mechanics of task forces work. I'm thinking in particular of Webcomics becoming a task force of Comics, and how to merge the article classifications. I think I've seen at milhist that each taskforce has its own classifications, but how is this set up with the classification bot if all the classifications run off the same template, in the milhist instance off the milhist template? Hiding Talk 20:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It's set up through a combination of a central assessment and the task force tags. {{WPMILHIST}}, for example, has the normal class parameter, which causes it to generate a "X-Class military history articles" category for the bot. The same parameter is used with each task force tag to create additional "X-Class something articles" categories; for example, if class is set to "B" and French-task-force is set to "yes", the template generates Category:B-Class French military history articles.
(If the project uses importance ratings, this will be a little more complex, since those won't necessarily be the same across all task forces. You'd want to introduce an explicit parameter for each task force that wants it, then; for example, Webcomics-task-force-importance.) Kirill Lokshin 20:11, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
WikiProject Biography has also successfully integrated several task forces and child projects using the same scheme. This is tried and tested and nothing revolutionary. --kingboyk 19:02, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
Can one task force be under multiple projects? If we are going to combine many smaller WikiProjects under larger ones, we are going to have overlap. For instance, WikiProject Georgia Tech would fall under WikiProject Georgia and WikiProject Universities.↔NMajdan•talk 19:14, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces for all your task force needs!!!!! (sorry :) ) -- TimNelson 11:56, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Exceptions?

I like the idea, but what to do with projects that don't fit into 'country' division? For example, would WP:Sociology be a taskforce of (too general and thus rather inactive) WP:Social sciences? We need a clear hierarchical structure about what where the WikiProject line ends and taskforce beings. Next, the difference between a WProject and TaskForce is not that clear (isn't this just playing with names)? Finally, how do deal with overlapping taskforces: i.e. why Polish Military taskforce is a taskforce of WPMILHIST and not WPPOLAND? Obviously, because it was created under more active WPMILHIST first, but what if WPCOUNTRYX project will decide to have its own military taskforce not knowing WPMILHIST has them 'covered'? I can see some organizational confusion from that. Also, what about 'Military biographies' taskforc? Would WPMILHIST or WPBIO claim it? How can it be seamlessly intergrated into both?-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  01:39, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

There is a point here. It should be noted that projects under this model will have to be proposed before being recognized, and, on that basis, will presumably know which "parent" projects exist. And it could be that a task force might still have the name WikiProject, like the scion projects of WikiProject Australia do today. I would propose that the telling point might be which "parent" project handles any infoboxes or other templates that a scion project would use. So, for instance, perhaps a sociology biography project might use the biography infobox, making that the more direct "parent" project over sociology. This presumes that pretty much everyone will eventually have infoboxes, but having looked over the VA articles that seems to be pretty likely fairly soon. John Carter 01:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
The discussion at WT:COUNCIL has actually turned towards a more layered delineation, using several "tiers" of WikiProjects rather than a straight WikiProject/task force division. The main distinction remains the practical one of whether a project has its own processes (most importantly, its own assessment and review), or uses a parent project's.
(But the non-country structure is, admittedly, more difficult to figure out; that's why the proposal concentrates mainly on the per-country projects, and leaves the others to a vaguer arrangement.)
We are still developing, in some sense, the general theory of running joint task forces under several projects; but there are pretty well-formed examples, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/Military history, that show how it can be set up. With enough technical cleverness, the exact location of the task force doesn't really matter; it can function equivalently as a task force of both projects from those projects' respective perspectives. Kirill Lokshin 03:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] WikiProject Proliferation

I'm getting concerned about the number of small WikiProjects which are appearing, and which I would classify as "vanity WikiProjects". Quite possibly I'm partly to blame having started WP:KLF, but in my defence that was merely a formalisation of an already active effort to document that band, an effort which has resulted in 4 FAs and a general improvement - I would contend - in the aspirations of popular culture articles.

A couple of examples I've stumbled across recently:

  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Big Four of Thrash Metal - We have an NPOV violation in the title. The "project" has 2 members, no FAs, no GAs, no action plan, and is surely superfluous to the heavy metal or musicians WikiProjects.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject The Flaming Lips - 1 member, no FAs, no GAs, no action plan.

Now I'm sure some folks will return with "live and let live", "we can't police this", etc., but it has to be considered that hundreds of vanity projects with their tags plastered all over talk pages and very little real activity improving articles doesn't give the active projects a very good name. --kingboyk 18:59, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Could some of these more outlandish projects just be nominated at WP:MfD? Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 20:50, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I wouldn't have a problem with that. What do others think? --kingboyk 21:03, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
No, I don't have a problem. There's an attitude among Wikipedians, however, that crappy pages should be left "in case someone wants to work on it later". I'm fairly certain that's why we have so many right now. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 01:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Several WikiProjects have been taken to MFD in the past and been deleted, so I don't see why we should not nominate those projects for deletion. (hmmm, projects for deletion... or maybe Projects for Discussion... or not, just thinking out loud.) -- Ned Scott 07:45, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Does anyone have any idea how many of these projects are out there? John Carter 15:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
(Undent) Would it be possible to write a simpe 'what a wikiproject is and is not' guideline essay, and construct a bot to deposit a welcome banner link to it each time a WP is initiated? The banner, and essay, could contain a link to MfD, so that those who create genuinely bad projects (the Flaming Lips?), can delete them? The essay might want to note that a single band does not a project make, not even big famous bands. (I, for example edit the Rush pages. there are a few regular editors, and we know who each other is, I think. We don't, and probably never would/should, constitute WP:RUSH.) Just a thought. ThuranX 15:59, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
I think this would be great. I'd be happy to write up a draft guideline if someone can come up with a decent title. Unless we are all happy with "What a Wikiproject is". Would we want a guideline or an essay though. A guideline would have force if it is approved by consensus (though I can't imagine much opposition to this) but an essay would be mainly opinion. As for the bot though, while I think its a good idea, I just don't see many project creators really caring about it, at least not the ones that create the kinds of projects this will affect. Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 20:46, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
Never mind. This already seems to exist: here. Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 20:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiProjects are becoming a pain in the butt. Many of the articles I've edited have been 'adopted' by some project or other that few if any of the article's editors know or care about. Often an article is appropriated by a project that isn't a good fit. Fortunately, not one of the dozens of projects that has descended upon articles that interest me has ever produced anything more than a big ugly banner on the article's talk page. What's the point? Editors will edit articles that interest them anyway, and they find them via links, categories and searches. Most projects are just froth, noise and bloat. --Harumphy 22:51, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A decent idea

I think this is a decent idea (as implied by my heading). However, I have some concerns as to the specifics of implementation. At this point, there are so many WikiProjects, that if this were enacted, we would have to start a project to consolidate the projects. Second, what about objections for individual projects. Would this idea just be a completely overriding rule or would there be a discussion over each objection? Finally, although this sound like a good idea in theory, this would take a lot of wotk to implement. Hundreds, possibly thousands of pages would have to be moved, deleted, and edited. This could take months, possibly a year to fully implement (longer for contested mergers). Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 20:46, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

  • And another concern: Some parent projects have fewer members than their children. For example, Project:United States has 17 listed members, while Project:Michigan has more than 50, most individual states have few members, but many have quite a lot. What will happen to projects that are bigger than their parent? Mr.Z-mantalk¢Review! 21:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What would become of "disciplinary" Projects?

OK, maybe that is a bad heading. But I noted in the project page that this subject isn't explicitly covered. Do the rest of you think that it would be a good idea if, for instance, most or all of the projects that relate to medicine would possibly become recognized as sub-projects or whatever they're called of medicine or biology, all the projects relating to specific lifeforms become subprojects of Tree of Life or Biology, and so on? I can see some opposition to such already exists, but think that it might be workable, provided we don't go too far and try to make all scientific projects subjects of WikiProject:Science or anything like that. John Carter 20:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Easy instructions for becoming a task force

After reading this comment on the talk page of WikiProject Television, I realized that maybe one reason so many start a whole new WikiProject is because it's easier (in their view) than a task force. Some easy to use instructions, both for the WikiProjects housing the task forces, and for the task force seekers, would likely help much of this reform take care of itself. -- Ned Scott 05:10, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It's mainly the parent projects that need detailed instructions; once a large project has figured out its task force scheme, the procedure for anyone wanting to create a task force basically boils down to "ask the parent project". ;-) Kirill Lokshin 07:29, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Ah, good point. -- Ned Scott 15:08, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tiers versus task forces

Some (possibly rambling) thoughts: suppose we go with a tiered system and merely make the distinction that "task force" is a term used to refer to a Tier 1 WikiProject that resides on a subpage of the parent rather than a separate page.

Consider the following WikiProject tiers:

Tier 1 WikiProject
  • Not responsible for maintaining its own banner tag.
  • Uses assessment & review infrastructure provided by parent Tier 2 project(s).
  • Default level for a newly created project.
Tier 2 WikiProject
  • Responsible for creating and maintaining a WikiProject banner tag that includes support for all Tier 1 projects descended from it.
  • Responsible for providing assessment & review infrastructure to all Tier 1 projects descended from it.
  • Must meet certain requirements:
    • No active parent project; or
    • Covers some minimum number of articles; and is approved by the community (via some process whose specifics are to be determined).

We can take the expedient of pre-approving, say, all the top-level country projects (once they set up the needed infrastructure); this allows us to quickly get rid of all the country sub-projects' separate banners. Other projects can go through an approval process to get to Tier 2.

Is any of that more-or-less sensible? Kirill Lokshin 04:22, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I think most of it is good, and a good starting point for discussion of the "tiers". I might go for Tier 1 as being the top level project, with 2 being the "child" project. Doing so might also allow for Tiers 3 through whatever somewhere down the line as well. I know the Saints project I work with might potentially in the past have been seen as being potentially a Tier 3+ project (Religion-Christianity-Saints or something similar), and think it might be a good idea to prepare for further levels like that somewhere down the line. John Carter 15:07, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I would tend to view the tiers as being tied more to a project's role rather than the nesting of its scope; broader-scope projects are not necessarily going to be higher-tier, because the idea is to produce active cluster projects rather than inactive umbrella ones. Consider, for example, the following descent tree:
  • Telecommunications
    • Audiovisual telecommunications
      • Television
        • British TV shows
          • Blackadder
        • Anime and manga
          • Gundam
There are a number of different arrangements possible; but looking at, say, activity levels and editor clustering, we might attempt the following:
  • Telecommunications (Tier 2)
    • Audiovisual telecommunications (Tier 1, uses Telecommunications infrastructure)
      • Television (Tier 2)
        • British TV shows (Tier 1, uses Television infrastructure)
          • Blackadder (Tier 1, uses Television infrastructure)
        • Anime and manga (Tier 2)
          • Gundam (Tier 1, uses Anime and manga infrastructure)
Note that we would now have descendant WikiProjects that are higher-tier than their (logical) parents, because they're more natural clustering areas for editor/article coordination. Kirill Lokshin 15:41, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Points gratefully acknowledged. I do see one possible stumbling block in implementation, however. Right now, I can't see how we could prevent someone who works with a Tier 2 bannered project adding entirely on their own volition parameters for a task force tab without any sort of approval from anyone else. Someone from Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern California could just create a Buena Park, California task force with no outside involvement, for instance, even if that individual were the only interested party. Are there are ideas what if anything would be done if that situation were to arise? John Carter 14:55, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Use of name "Tier 1" to refer to the "more junior" project, and the name "Tier 2" to refer to the "more senior" project, seems counter-intuitive to me. It makes more sense to me to have "Tier 1" refer to the senior-level project, "Tier 2" to the more junior-level project, "Tier 3" to still more junior-level project, etc. For example:
  • Tier 1 - Texas
  • Tier 2 - Southeastern Texas
  • Tier 3 - Houston
Using "Tier 2" to refer to the senior-most level limits us to just one junior level ("Tier 1") - is that the intent? Spamreporter1 22:17, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
That is the intent, actually; as I said just above, I'm viewing the tiers as referring to the project's role rather than it's scope. "Tier 1" refers to projects that uses a parent project as a facade for its interactions with the community; once that's done, it no longer really matters to anyone outside the projects what the exact internal structure is, since people outside the project will see a single project "cluster" rather than a bunch of individual projects. In your example, if we just have a Texas tag on talk pages (with some combination of sub-project labels indicated), a Texas assessment system, etc., then nobody outside the Texas projects really needs to be concerned with what the exact relationship between the SE Texas & Houston groups is; as far as the rest of the community is concerned, they're organizational groups internal to the core Texas project rather than completely independent groups that merely happen to share parts of the same scope.
(In other words, the question of which of the projects handles some particular concern is no longer really relevant to anyone not involved in them; we can now go directly to the Texas project with an issue, and rely on it to figure out which of its sub-groups, if any, should be dealing with it.) Kirill Lokshin 22:34, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The only reform needed

The only reform that's needed is a technical one, like used on Talk:Abraham Lincoln, where project banners are wrapped up into a kind of collection tag, so they don't take up much real estate. Otherwise, I think projects work well as-is and "reform" isn't necessary. There's no need to rein in what's actually working well for the Wikipedia and its development, as any "reform" that's overwrought may well push out of the Wikipedia many experienced and dedicated editors. There is no need for micromanagement; projects are already doing a good job of following de facto standards and policing themselves. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 17:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem is not with projects that are working and doing a good job. Those projects will, of course, be left alone if that makes sense. You might want to see my response to a similar concern at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#Why not work with the current parent/descendent/similar project organization?. -- Ned Scott 20:03, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
The projects I work on are already cooperative with parent/descendent/etc. projects. No reform necessary, just common sense and the willingness to discuss boundaries. The bottom line is that we should generally encourage good etiquette, and the rest should fall into place. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 20:10, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
There are a lot of problems that I don't think you are aware of.. -- Ned Scott 20:28, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, a few disputes that people will eventually work out, without the need for new rules or guidelines. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 20:33, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
The consensus seems to not support your view. -- Ned Scott 22:20, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Appeal to consensus never convinces me of anything, just like appeal to credentials (a la Essjay) doesn't. If you have examples to back up your position, I'll take a look at that. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 00:25, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
I think a careful reading or Template talk:WikiProjectBanners would be instructive here. Suffice it to say that a substantial number of people have a quite low opinion of WikiProject efficacy. Kirill Lokshin 03:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Back to left...

To Kirill, I read through more than half the page, and I discovered that all of one person is expressing a deep antipathy toward WikiProjects and the usefulness of banners (I don't see *anything* wrong with advertising a WikiProject or wanting project coverage of any article that might be related to the project scope). Otherwise, everyone else appears to be conscientiously seeking out a solution to the "banner derby" on some talk pages. I support that effort. The main projects I work on have 'small' parameters implemented. I'm also open to the one-liner banner idea. Heck, I don't even really mind Template:WikiProjectBanners too much, as it seems to be used very sparingly so far. I just don't think it ultimately matters that most talk pages would continue to sport full-figured project banners, while the rest would need reduced versions. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 05:36, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

The reform proposal is about more than just banners. -- Ned Scott 19:22, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
I have already indicated that I think the only reform needed is to technically deal with the "banner derby" issue. That's my position. Otherwise, most WikiProjects are dealing with various issues with aplomb on their own. Every problem doesn't need a new governance solution. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 19:57, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Non-league football

Same logo the football project. Same subject matter, but a subset thereof. Currently plastering talk pages with banners, when it's blatantly obvious they should be a task force sharing a banner.

The question is do I shut down the AWB user and have a word? --kingboyk 19:45, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Alright, I did just that (or at least, asked him to stop). For an example page of this farce see Talk:Hemel Hempstead Town F.C.. --kingboyk 19:53, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Formal Proposal?

It looks like the majority of respondents are agreed upon the existing text. Should the page now be put up for formal adoption, however that is done? John Carter 16:36, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

The existing text is still rather lacking in practical detail, no? It's a bit premature to try to adopt something that lacks implementation details; think that we need to come up with some more concrete proposals for:
  1. How to set up the tier/task force schema
  2. Which projects would fit in where
  3. What community approval process, if any, is needed
before this could really go forward. Kirill Lokshin 19:37, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
Remember, I'm a homicidal maniac who just recently returned to this planet (and also honestly rather new here). My knowledge of the conventions here is rather limited. It is nice to see that it did reignite interest in the proposal, though. John Carter 13:33, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
As I don't trust myself to insert the following ideas into the proposal page itself, I'm putting them here:
1. Tier 2 Projects (those with specific banners) will be determined by a consensus vote of active editors with a predetermined minimum history of activity. Certain guidelines, yet to be determined, for what would qualify a project for Tier 2 status could be made later, but at least initially the predominant guidelines would be (1) whether the Project deals with a "core topic", such as perhaps a standardly recognized academic discipline, and (2) whether there are a given number of other projects whose scope is such that they are clearly "sub-projects" of the proposed Tier 2 project. Proposed Tier 1 projects will also be subject to consensus approval. This process will be rather quicker, however, and will serve primarily to ensure that duplicate projects are not created.
All proposed Tier 2 projects will have to have a specific, detailed draft project proposal page. The consensus approval vote will be specifically about the proposed WikiProject page as proposed. Tier 2 projects will be discussed a minimum of two weeks before explicitly being accorded Tier 2 status and will require consensus approval by no less than 20 editors, at least half of the approve votes must come from individuals who are not recognized members of a directly-related project; proposed Tier 1 projects will be subject to a one-week approval period, and also be required to receive consensus approval. They will have no minimum number of required votes, however.
2. Here, I'm not really sure what exactly you meant, so I'm going to say what I think you might have meant. Projects will be organized, whenever possible, in a hierarchical system similar to that of the existing Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory, with individual Projects listed according to their scope. Given the ever-changing number and scopes of projects, there will be no hard and fast rules regarding which specific projects will be recognized as "parent" projects. However, any projects which have already been accorded Tier 2 status which clearly significantly overlap the scope of the other proposed projects will probably have to be mentioned on the proposed Tier 2 WikiProject page for it to receive consensus approval.
3. As everywhere in wikipedia, there will be no specific rules about who can and cannot indicate an opinion. However, at least one active member of each active WikiProject will be encouraged to join the WikiProject Council. The approval process per se will take place on a subpage of the WikiProject Council, although individuals indicating an opinion will not have to be members of the Council.


I know the above has more than a few weaknesses, but it is at least a starting point for the discussion of details. John Carter 13:54, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I think this is probably over-bureaucratized a bit; in particular:
  • I think the Council should be kept out of this, if only for the practical reason that this is meant to be an explicitly a community-oriented process.
  • The idea of formal proposals is probably not going to work, given the enormous number of projects to be grandfathered. In most cases, the discussion can simply evaluate the existing project, so a separate proposal page won't really be helpful.
  • I don't think there's any real reason to require proposals for creation of the lower-level projects, since they won't be causing tag proliferation issues and so forth under this model. Presumably the relevant parent projects will be able to deal with such ideas and keep anything silly from happening, as well.
More generally, we need to avoid setting up a chicken-and-egg scenario where a project can't get approval to do things without a history of already having done them. On the most basic level, this will mean that projects with no usable parent will need to be given (at least provisional) higher-tier status, as they'd presumably be completely dead in the water otherwise. Kirill Lokshin 15:33, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Clearly, you know a lot more about this subject than I do, so I defer to your greater experience. For what it's worth, though, I more or less based the proposal on the guidelines for "featured portals", which I just recently noticed, and thought that maybe it might be best to make the banner WikiProjects the effective equivalents of Featured Portals, including having to meet substantially similar quality criteria. And, out of curiosity, would there be any advantages to creating a "Featured WikiProject" nomination and approval process? John Carter 14:25, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Small WikiProjects

There is a problem here, but it isn't WikiProject size, it's WikiProject activity. WP:KLF (44 articles, 4 FAs) may be small but it is obviously highly effective. Turning it into a task force wouldn't help it; the best you can hope is that it wouldn't hamper it. On the other hand, I have no doubt that there are WikiProjects out there that are an appropriate size according to this proposal, but are utterly disfunctional because they were created on a whim and no-one is working towards their goals or even doing basic maintainance.

Still on small WikiProjects, I disagree very strongly with the assertion that "a project covering a hundred articles... gains nothing by creating (and expending significant effort to maintain) its own peer review process." I work on a WikiProject that until recently had only a hundred articles, and I found the ability to track article quality to be exceptionally helpful and well worth the effort. I'm curious whether the authors of this proposal have actually worked on small WikiProjects?

These issues aside, I broadly agree with the description of the problems, but disagree with the proposed solutions. Is the situation really so grim that we have to start accrediting projects? Is the harm that someone can do by creating a stupid WikiProject really on a par with the harm they could do with a bot or the admin tools?

Hesperian 00:03, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, the question of size versus activity is somewhat oversimplified, in any case. It would be somewhat more correct to say that the two are correlated (at least insofar as useful activity is concerned) near a "natural" clustering size for a project that's largely dependent on matching a pre-existing community of users sharing some concretely identifiable interest; in other words, the closer a WikiProject's scope is to some X such that an arriving editor is likely to intuitively belive "I am interested in X" beforehand, the more raw editorial energy is available, which generally translates to productivity.
As for your specific comment, I'm a bit confused about how a peer review process is tied to "the ability to track article quality"; I would have thought that the latter would be done through an article assessment process instead. In any case, my comment above is also applicable here, I think; while it's certainly possible for a small project to be situated on a natural enough topic cluster such that the available manpower concentration warrants separate processes, this isn't that common.
For a more concrete example of what I mean, consider the hypothetical WikiProject Parrots and WikiProject Hawks. If each maintains its own separate peer review, then people who are interested in birds generally—and we would expect these to be substantially more numerous than the people interested in either parrots or hawks but not in other types of birds—must now keep track of two separate processes. Conversely, if the projects are made task forces of a WikiProject Birds, they can now use a single central peer review, which is much more convenient for the bulk of the editors involved. (Obviously, this argument hinges on the point that the number of editors interested in both parrots and hawks is significantly greater than the number of editors interested in one but not the other. In cases where this isn't true, it no longer holds.)
As far as the grimness of the situation is concerned: the real problem is that, unlike bots or admins, WikiProjects don't have any formalized status, and are basically permitted to function only at the community's whim. The harm of stupid (or dysfunctional) WikiProjects isn't that they do any sort of immediate damage to Wikipedia, but rather that their actions are detrimental to the reputation of WikiProjects in general, and thus hinder the ability of the actually effective projects to operate without rousing the ire of the community at large. Kirill Lokshin 00:31, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Re peer review: my apologies, I misread you. I was thinking of article assessment. I agree that it would seem redundant for small projects to run their own formal peer review processes.
Your comments about needing a critical mass to translate into productivity are perfectly logical, but they don't fit the data. Some of the most productive projects are ones with smaller scope. WP:KLF is the best example, but it is by no means an outlier. WP:BANKSIA has 220 articles but is very active and has 3 FAs. WP:CPLANTS has 250 articles but is having no troubles with enthusiasm or activity. These are just the small projects on my radar - I'm sure there are plenty more.
Can you explain to me how stupid or dysfunctional WikiProjects hinder the ability of effective projects to operate? I once watched a new-ish and very immature editor launch into starting up a WikiProject. I knew he would run out of puff and the WikiProject would flop, and that's exactly what happened. But as far as I'm aware, it didn't hamper my WikiProjects.
It concerns me that this could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is claimed that "stupid or dysfunctional WikiProjects hinder.. effective projects", so we bring in a whole lot of rules and regulations to lock out stupid or dysfunctional WikiProjects, so the next time I want to start up a WikiProject, I am hindered by a whole lot of rules and regulations, and the blame for that is placed on the stupid or dysfunctional WikiProjects that would exist if there weren't rules and regulations to keep them out.
Hesperian 00:57, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Trying to follow along both trains of though here:
You're confusing, I think, "productive" with "needing extensive internal structure". The three projects you've noted are, of course, highly effective in terms of article-writing; but this doesn't mean that they need a lot of structural features (and, indeed, they're pretty much totally lacking in them). What, for example, would be the drawbacks if WP:CPLANTS were to use the tagging/assessment infrastructure of WP:PLANTS instead of maintaining its own? As far as the small project is concerned, it would be keeping the functionality it currently has (its own tracking of article status), and simply having the associated infrastructure/template coding/etc. taken off its hands by the larger parent project. Is there any benefit to CPLANTS having to maintain its own formal process, rather than using a centralized one? (And what happens when WikiProject African plants, WikiProject Vines, WikiProject Flowers, etc., all start up their own parallel processes and go through the same articles?)
The immediate issue, in some sense, is article tagging. WikiProject tags are now so routine that a new project—however misguided and small—can produce enormous numbers of them in a relatively short time. This ease of large-scale tagging and the proliferation of projects that tag redundantly (typically parent and child projects, but sometimes clusters of related projects that heavily overlap) is now getting on people's nerves sufficiently that "solutions" are being proposed which are equally harmful to both productive projects and unproductive ones. (The various discussions revolving around {{WikiProjectBanners}} strayed into this area, more often than not.)
Beyond that is a broader issue of WikiProjects' role in the community. If they're to be regarded as more than incidental collections of editors, but as natural and legitimate places for things like guideline formation, decentralized processes (e.g. the various proposals for farming out AFD to WikiProjects), and so forth, then there needs to be some mechanism for ensuring that the projects—or at least those projects that take on these roles—are respectable, policy-abiding, and generally responsible structures. The pernicious effect of ill-behaved or dysfunctional WikiProjects is that they provide ready arguments against giving any sort of greater role to WikiProjects in general, due to the (quite legitimate) concern that they'd misuse it.
My idea with an accreditation system, then, was not to place limits on creating WikiProjects, per se, but rather to allow for a distinction between "trusted" WikiProjects—those, in other words, with whose scope, goals, and operations the community at large is comfortable, at least to the extent of taking a hands-off approach to them—and the ones that the community feels aren't (yet) up to that level.
(It may well be that I'm being entirely naive with respect to how loose a leash the community would be willing to permit to any WikiProject, of course.) Kirill Lokshin 02:12, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
I think the crux of the matter for me is that projects really do lose functionality when they hand over their infrastructure. WP:BANKSIA manages its own assessments, and as a result gets this useful page and this useful box. WP:WA lets WP:AUS handle article assessments, and as a result it has absolutely no capacity to track the status of articles within its scope. And in return we get to type {{WP Australia | WA=yes}} instead of {{WP Western Australia}}! So it boils down to this: in the current technical environment, merging small projects into larger projects as taskforces will kneecap some small but highly effective WikiProjects. As long as that's the case, this proposal is broken IMO.
I'm also not convinced that upmerging highly specific WikiProjects would address the banner proliferation problem. If WP:BANKSIA didn't exist as a WikiProject with its own banner, then there would be 200 Banksia article talk pages that would be tagged into WP:AUS and WP:PLANTS, rather than just WP:BANKSIA; so sometimes upmerging means more banners not less.
I agree that people shouldn't be allowed to create WikiProjects willy-nilly if those WikiProjects are then to be given (or claim to themselves) roles in formulating policy, guidelines, convention, processes, etcetera. WP:STUB is a good example - I still can't figure out how WP:STUB gained the authority to demand people ask permission before creating new stubs. I can see why you might want a system whereby the wider community can endorse and authorise the guidelines and processes put in place by such a WikiProject. I'll reserve my judgement on the accreditation aspect of this for now.
Hesperian 02:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
As far as the practical issue of functionality is concerned, that's a technical problem that can be (easily!) solved by a more intelligent template design. See, for example, WP:MHA#Task force statistics; each of the 30+ task forces gets their own set of statistics/worklists/logs, even though all of them use the same banner. (I was actually assuming that this was going to be the case for any rearrangements under this proposal; it certainly wasn't my intent to take useful functionality away from smaller projects.)
The template proliferation issue is, of course, open to debate. Keep in mind, though, that there's nothing preventing AUS and PLANTS from adding their banners in addition to the BANKSIA one, in the current system; and, indeed, that's the only way those projects can get those articles into their assessment lists, unless BANKSIA's banner is given the ability to generate the needed categories for parent projects (which is, frankly, a horrible mess to code for all but the simplest relationships). So instead of having three potential banners, you'd only have two if the child project used one (or both, even) of its parents' banners rather than having a separate one.
Kirill Lokshin 03:07, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
WP:BANKSIA's banner does indeed manage its parent project obligations. But 90% of Banksias are from WA, so it turns out we need an explicit {{WP Australia}} so that we can do the |WA=yes. An example of the complexity you're talking about I suppose. This raises another problem but: how do you propose to handle the situation where a small WikiProject has more than one parent project? e.g. WP:BANKSIA is a child of both WP:PLANTS and WP:AUSBIOTA.
Thanks for taking the time to work through this stuff with me. Hesperian 03:17, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, presumably it would be a subgroup of both; see, for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Korean military history task force and Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Australian military history task force. Obviously, if it were to be completely task-force-ified (i.e. by moving to a subpage of a larger project), you'd need to choose one of the parents as a host, but this is pretty arbitrary, and becomes basically irrelevant once the corresponding redirects are prevented; and if it stays on a separate page, the issue doesn't even come up.
There are, of course, different possibilities as far as the technical implementation is concerned—I would guess, for example, that the "parent" in terms of tag usage would be AUS rather than AUSBIOTA (i.e. articles would be double tagged with the PLANTS tag and the AUS tag, both of which would support parameters for BANKSIA), as I suspect AUSBIOTA isn't going to be maintaining its own tags—but the details are quite flexible. The only real requirement is that at least one of the parent tags generate the needed assessment data for BANKSIA's articles. Kirill Lokshin 03:28, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

WRT to talk page tagging, {{KLF}} contains the necessary code to allow it to replace {{WPBiography}}, {{album}} and {{song}}. I put the same functionality into {{WPBeatles}}. Of course I wouldn't recommend this solution to most folks as I happened to be active in all the projects concerned and was sure I knew what I was doing (and, I ran the bot which did most of the tagging for WPBio, and it skips pages which contain either of those templates ;)). Just to point out that WP:KLF don't even contribute to talk page clutter... :) (See e.g. Talk:The KLF or Talk:The White Room). --kingboyk 00:58, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite

I've tried my hand at rewriting the proposal to take into account some of the discussion that's taken place since the first draft; comments would be appreciated! Kirill Lokshin 15:26, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

We haven't had much discussion that relates to the document at hand in the last 11 days. I've started wondering, what's the process from here? Do we do another rewrite? If so, would Kirill prefer to do it himself, or should I move some of the consensus points across into the main document? -- TimNelson 04:36, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] guideline forking

Should we add something about guideline forking? I've noticed a few times where a WikiProject seems to reinvent the wheel (in good faith and all that) but results in conflicting guidelines with over-all Wikipedia and/or other projects. Even if the forks don't conflict, we could also note that it's simply more efficient to help smaller groups find existing discussion rather than having to figure it out all over again. This is, of course, different than revisiting a situation, which is always an option, as well as splitting a discussion to avoid group think. -- Ned Scott 04:22, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Good idea, and something that is sorely needed. >Radiant< 10:13, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
    • I've added some notes on this to the section on redundancy. The wording can likely be improved on, though; I'm not sure if I've covered all the relevant points here. Kirill Lokshin 22:34, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
      • Not sure how to address it, but there is also the possibility of two projects not otherwise related (Biography and Physics, for example), having a common interest in an article but having different guidelines. The example above might not be the best one, but something to address an article having multiple different skew proposed article structures could be included as well. John Carter 14:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tier 0 projects

I'm not entirely sure that these projects should be kept from having banners. Looking at several of the articles in the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/VA tagging#History section, which include several of our most important articles, I found over 10 articles which are important to wikipedia which I couldn't really find other appropriate history banners to place on them. These include History of the world, History, Historiography, European colonization of the Americas, and others. Maybe we could rather try to talk these projects into restricting their scope, so that they cover primarily those articles which by their nature are such that they don't comfortably fit into any of the smaller scope WikiProjects? John Carter 14:33, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

A number of those will be covered by the Core Topics project; but I suppose you're right in that there will be some slipping through the cracks. Perhaps a neater solution would be to have Tier 0 projects tag only articles that have no other, more specific WikiProject tags? I was mainly trying to avoid the situation where WP:HIST would suddenly decide tag a few hundred thousand articles with tags redundant to all of the more specific ones. Kirill Lokshin 15:34, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
Having these projects tag only the articles that wouldn't otherwise be tagged sounds fine by me. John Carter 17:28, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Issue of OWNership

The complaint lodged against some WikiProjects seems to be their tendency to want to OWN certain artciles/topics. Yes, this proposal does appear as though it will help with that some, but it will also undercut exactly what makes the good wikiprojects work.

Wikiprojects work because a person is interested in a specific topic that related to their life/interests, etc. They spend a great deal of time editing in that given area precisely because they are passionate. The very ways that this would diffuse the issue of ownership would also diffuse the level of interest. And so -- for example -- WP Christianity is not very active. It is a broad topic, and theoritcally should be covering thousands of articles. But no one is interested in doing too much -- because it is too broad. But many WP that would be task-forces under this proposal are very active and effective -- precisely because they are specific. Take away the specificity -- take aay the interest.

Yes, there are "vanity wikiprojects" (nice neologism, I like it). THe solution -- make the process for starting wikiprojects a little more formal. There are guidelines on the WP Proposal page (5-10 interested editors, etc), yet I have seen people pop up with wikiprojects without even listing them there. Circumventing that process allows this proliferation of such vanity wikiprojects. I would firm up the guidelines for starting wikiprojects before I would support this major change of the whole wikiproject system. -- Pastordavid 02:53, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Your second paragraphs seems to be making the same point that the critical mass section here does, so I suspect we're not actually disagreeing. The proposal here—particularly in its current form—isn't meant to necessarily cause any projects to be merged, so the smaller projects would retain their identities under it. The major change here is that these smaller projects would use a larger project's banner template rather than a separate one; but I don't really see that as substantially affecting their internal dynamics. Am I missing something obvious here? Kirill Lokshin 04:49, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
While I do think some projects can be too broad in their scope (well, not necessarily broad, but a scope that includes a great many articles), that doesn't always cause a lack of interest. For example, WikiProject Anime and manga is very active, but fans of anime and manga have a very large range of tastes and preference. As much of an "anime dork" as I consider myself to be, I'd say that I don't like most anime, and I'm not very interested in manga. However, since the project is able to focus greatly on common issues, (such as translations of titles, language formatting, listing multiple sets of voice actors for different languages, common production elements, terminology, etc) the project is very active, even if you only edit a very small amount of the articles the project covers in it's scope. So depending on the project type, a large number of articles might not be an issue.
At the same time, WikiProject Television isn't nearly as active, and likely because people want to edit specific articles and do specific projects. However, that's a prime example of how the concept of task forces can work with large scale WikiProjects. By making show-specific projects into task forces then editors can have that show-focus, while still having a place to talk about things that can apply to any show. In many cases existing projects already do this very thing, but still call themselves both WikiProjects because the task force idea wasn't well known when the projects started. For example, one project I'm very involved with, WikiProject Digimon could be a task force of WikiProject:Anime and manga without having to change how we did anything. It would be a change in title only, but would help people understand how we're connected to other projects, thus making projects easier to find. (a better use of time when someone sees that they can address many shows in the same time they can address one show, etc). -- Ned Scott 15:19, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
If the issue is diffusing WikiProjects by making them part of broader-scope projects (how I first read the page), then the criticism above stands -- I believe it will be counter-productive. If this is not the purpose, then the only real reason for this restructuring seems to be the issue of banners on talk pages. I think that restructuring a system that appears to be working just to deal with banners seems like overkill. There are technical solutions to that "problem." As to inactive Projects, I still think that actually making people use the proposed project process, rather than starting a project without any process, would help that problem. -- Pastordavid 20:58, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
The whole idea of this is to reduce counter-productive activity. Banners is only one of many .. (pardon the pun) red flags.. that shows this issue needs to be addressed. The majority of projects that we are hoping to reduce/fix are not productive at all, and are likely not the same projects that you have in mind. This reform will only be applied to projects where it makes sense, and healthy projects will likely be left alone (although might become involved in helping other projects, sharing advice and such on why they are successful, etc). I have a lot of faith in the advice and insight by Kirill Lokshin, and he has a very accurate grasp of the current situation. -- Ned Scott 00:27, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Additions to the Directory?

Would it be asking too much if maybe we put some sort of protection on the various pages of the project directory, and made it a point that only those projects which have received some form of accreditation could be listed there? Otherwise, many people create, shall we say, unimpressive projects and list them immediately, making the directory unwieldy in the extreme. Just a thought. John Carter 21:12, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikiproject Council

There is already a page at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council where much of what is being advocated here seems already to have been organized. Is this proposal meant to replace them? I think it would not be th best of ideas to replace a function group here, and it might be better to discuss improvements in how it works and what it does. DGG 21:22, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The Council was intended to be only a central discussion and planning forum; it doesn't really have either the needed infrastructure or—as far as I know—the support of the community to actually set up any sort of general system that individual WikiProjects might be expected to adhere to.
(Or, in somewhat more practical terms: there's no reason why the Council couldn't be worked into this somehow; but I avoided proposing such an arrangement so that this proposal wouldn't hinge on what the community at large thought of the Council.) Kirill Lokshin 21:33, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
Many of us on this talk page are also apart of the Council project. Also, the Council is an idea that hasn't actually taken off yet, and is simply the current version of our over-all WikiProject organization efforts. Regardless of the name of the project or which talk page we are on, it's all the same effort and usually the same group of people. -- Ned Scott 00:20, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Agree. It's essentially the same people, but at the Council we talk about day to day issues, whereas here we're actually working towards reform (and, who knows, maybe some guidelines or policies). I'd have no objection to moving this into the Council's project space, but it may have more resonance if it stands alone. I don't know. --kingboyk 13:53, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Life cycle?

Perhaps some of these should be seen as something of a life cycle and thus retiring or upmerging should be seen as part of a natural process that happens when a WikiProject either completes its objectives or sinks into oblivion (Many are large and active, have a huge scope or are evolutionary and hence will never complete objectives). Maybe the process should be to raise a proposal on the WikiProject's talk page and, if being upmerged, link to that proposal on the WikiProject's talk page. This allows things to be done in an orderly fashion. Orderinchaos78 22:58, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

In addition to retiring and upmerging, I'd like to see userfying as an option. Hesperian 00:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Given that WikiProjects are (supposed to be) collaborative enterprises, whose userspace would they go into? And what role would they play once they had been userfied? Kirill Lokshin 00:35, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, context. I'm currently dealing with a user who has an unhealthy obsession with his school. We're constantly deleting articles on non-notable alumni, non-notable former headmasters, non-notable house systems... we recently deleted an article on the school oval, for cripes sake! This user's latest bright idea is to create a WikiProject. I've managed to convince him to keep it in his user space as an "informal" WikiProject. Had I failed to do so, the outcome would have been a fine example of the kind of WikiProject that is squarely in the sights of this reform proposal. In this specific situation, I think the most appropriate course would be to userfy that WikiProject rather than deleting or upmerging it. Therefore I would like to see userfying as an option. Yes, of course it is only an option where it is obvious whose userspace it should go to, and where that user is not precious about other people editing in his user space.
As for what role it would play, it would have to be restricted to informal article tracking and communication between a small group of contributors. I've used this model myself a number of times; e.g. through the first half of 2006 I collaborated with one other user on the convict era of Western Australia, coordinating at User:Hesperian/Notes/Convicts; it worked well. I suspect that, faced with a threat of closure and deletion, many users would choose to have their WikiProjects userfied in this way.
Hesperian 01:00, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
I'd hesitate to call such an enterprise a "WikiProject" at all, and userfying it does indeed sound correct. Might you provide a link to said userfied "project"? Don't worry, I don't want to overturn you or list it for deletion, just fancy having a look :) --kingboyk 13:59, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Another WA user and myself have a similar task force to the convict one at User:DanielT5/Wheatbelt Scope (the naming indicates its former status as a scope proposal which somewhat burst its own boundaries in the end) for improving articles in a particular region of Western Australia - once the improvement has been done the thing will most likely be shut down, as every one of the pages falls within the scope of WP:WA. The matter Hesperian raised is quite an amusing if frustrating ongoing situation that has resulted in more AfDs, MfDs, CfDs, RfDs and failed FACs than I care to count. Orderinchaos 11:24, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Another ridiculous example

Talk:Buckingham Palace is tagged by (amongst others) :

  • WikiProject England
  • WikiProject British Government
  • WikiProject London

Why these 3 aren't organised as taskforces of a UK Project and banner sharing is beyond my understanding.

It will also be interesting to see if any of these groups attempt to save the article's Featured status (Wikipedia:Featured article review/Buckingham Palace). --kingboyk 11:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Screenwriters#Please.2C_not_another_project_banner. I'm starting to wonder whether new projects should require approval from some technical committee before they are allowed to tag talk pages. Then we might be able to bring some order where currently there is chaos. --kingboyk 13:37, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Good question. My only answer is that there has been, to date, apparently little interest in setting up a UK project, because of the sheer number of more focused projects which are apparently resistant to the idea of sharing banners. Many of the projects for specific cities and US states have the same problem. And I would agree that maybe creating some formal process for recognizing projects, which might be required for a project to have a banner and/or a separate listing on the Project Directory, would probably be a good idea. John Carter 14:22, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
It's not at all clear—to me, at least—whether we could devise such a process that would be accepted by the community at large, though. Kirill Lokshin 21:34, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I can see that maybe if we protected the Project Directory and ensured that only project pages that met at least a certain minimum standard of quality would be included that might be acceptable to the community, particularly if some individuals occasionally offered help in setting up the project pages which get rejected simply on the basis of poor page quality. And, considering that the average person has no real clue how to set up a functional banner, many of the designers of these new projects might be willing to accept use of another project's banner if someone from that project (or at least someone other than themselves) revised the banner so that it could be used by the new project. John Carter 21:44, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] And another

Talk:Alfa_Romeo_in_motorsport is tagged by Wikipedia:WikiProject Formula One (fair enough). It's also tagged by Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorsport, whose banner reads:

“ This article is part of a parent project - WikiProject Motorsport - which brings together motorsport-related WikiProjects. It aims to co-ordinate the projects and improve the common aspects of various categories of motorsport. Consult the project page for further information ... ”

So now we have co-ordinating WikiProjects tagging articles too?! <kingboyk sighs> --kingboyk 23:18, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The scope

Banners and scopes, another example of what I think is people getting the wrong idea: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Canadian TV shows#Anime conventions. I don't know if they've actually been tagging pages yet, but people are missing the point on work and task distribution between projects. Here's another example situation: User talk:SatyrTN/Archive 4#Banners. WikiProjects of geographical locations also have a bad habit of tagging articles for any person place or thing remotely related to that area, like a person who was born there but had no other significant ties (such as a government official, etc) to the location. Then you have WikiProject Dogs or Cats tagging articles for fictional animals. And when you try to bring attention to it people get defensive. This is a major element of what's wrong with both tagging and over-all project scopes.

WikiProjects should not categorize, but rather be a method of work load (for a lack of better words). -- Ned Scott 00:30, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

And I should add, nothing has to be "separate". Projects can always work together, and people can always be apart of more than one project, or just drop in one whenever they have an idea. One idea that came up in WP:ANIME a long time ago was the idea of a "see also" for WikiProjects, where we could still link and connect without having to get off track with project scopes. -- Ned Scott 00:43, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I've initiated a similar discussion here. JACOPLANE • 2007-04-21 00:44
It seems to me this is a problem with specific projects, not with the concept of projects as a whole. Perhaps we need something like:
An editor has expressed concern that the article {{{1}}} doesn't fully fall within the scope of WikiProject reform. Please be careful to limit your activities to articles within your scope.

-- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 00:47, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, its shouldn't really be directed at editors, but just the project pages (tools) we use. -- Ned Scott 00:50, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Sorry - I should have explained my thoughts better. That banner could be added to a project's page, stating the article that a particular editor found outside of the scope. This has the advantage of letting an editor talk/warn/express concern to a project. That lessens the possibility of specific people's feelings getting hurt, while fostering some community within the project as they (hopefully) discuss whether or not the article really does fall within the scope. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:10, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars would apply here, though. Kirill Lokshin 01:19, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't really think it applies, unless the warning was used "to attack experienced editors."
That aside, the point I was trying to make is that if you have a problem with a particular WikiProject, bring it up with that WP. This group, and even WP:COUNCIL, really don't have any authority over any WP. In fact, since there aren't even any/many guidelines for WPs, the most effective way you can deal with a project over-tagging is to actually bring it to that project. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 04:41, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
(after three edit conflicts...) Well, one obvious point here is that the WikiProject system, as currently envisioned, is totally decentralized. Each WikiProject is autonomously responsible for deciding what the bounds of its scope is; we have no central authority that divides articles up between WikiProjects. (Nor should we, for that matter; the only results will be hurt feelings and needless bureaucracy.)
Once a project has decided that article X is of interest to it, then, there's a perfectly legitimate desire to get said article into the project's assessment/monitoring infrastructure. The "tags" themselves are a bit of a red herring in this regard; here, they merely happen to be the most obvious way of arranging a decentralized assessment system, given the sheer numbers involved. Kirill Lokshin 00:49, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I think we've grown to a point where we should start thinking about who's standing next to us, what projects are also around. Someone doesn't need to expand a scope just to work on an article. Think of it like discussion boards. Too often we think of WikiProjects as people, and we don't want to say "YOU can't edit that". It's not about people, it's about our tools. -- Ned Scott 00:56, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
WikiProjects do, fundamentally, function as groups of editors, though, regardless of what one may wish to say about how they should; and they will see it as someone telling them what they can't do. Kirill Lokshin 00:59, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Discussion splitting from my talk page: -- Ned Scott 01:00, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Frankly, I think you're going after the wrong thing here; we need tagging reform, not scope reform. Kirill Lokshin 00:49, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

But they tag that which they think is under their scope. I'm tired of hurt feelings and all that nonsense, I want to make WikiProjects into a real tool for getting stuff done. -- Ned Scott 00:52, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, because we've given them no alternative to said tagging. Turning projects into task forces (at least as far as tagging is concerned), for example, reduces the number of tags without interfering with the scope itself in any way.
More to the point: any systematic attempt to tell WikiProjects what they must and must not cover will, in my opinion, be seen as unwarranted and authoritarian, and will lead to an immediate and substantial drop in editor morale and project effectiveness. Kirill Lokshin 00:57, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting we improve advice on how people should consider project scopes when there are other projects around them. -- Ned Scott 00:59, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
But you're still approaching this backwards; you're trying to get projects to change scope in order to prevent them from tagging articles, not because you actually want them to consider those articles beyond their scope. This is really a technical problem, and requires technical solutions, not social ones. Kirill Lokshin 01:01, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I think we need to have a discussion about how WikiProjects enable discussion that leads to featured articles. Wikipedia:WikiProject Final Fantasy is a fantastic example of this. Why does this project have the correct scope to "get things done", whereas Wikipedia:WikiProject PlayStation gets nothing done? One thing we've noticed at WP:CVG is that task forces with an overly generic scope get very little done. This has little to do with projects tagging talk pages and more with defining what the best scope is for collaboration efforts. JACOPLANE • 2007-04-21 01:02
Meh. Scope tends not to matter as much as one would think; certainly there are quite broad projects that produce FAs. Kirill Lokshin 01:03, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Like the Video games project does.. But those featured articles are produced most effectively by more focused subprojects, much like the MILHIST project I presume. We have a few subprojects with the correct scope that do this effectively, and many others that do little other than add more bureaucracy. JACOPLANE • 2007-04-21 01:09
In my experience, most FAs tend to be produced by individual editors or small groups; the project (whether the core project or the subgroups) is there more to provide resources (e.g. peer review) than to engage in focused collaboration directly. I don't think that less-than-highly-active task forces are a problem; their existence is largely hidden from people outside the project, and they do serve as good staging areas even for infrequent discussion. Kirill Lokshin 01:19, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

On a related note, there has been some dispute at Talk:Megalith since the article was recently tagged by project paranormal - there is concern from those outside the project that the article will be the subject of undue weight on aspects that may not be on-topic (including things like pop culture references to megaliths). The discussion there may be of interest. --Minderbinder 01:21, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

I laugh when I see an article that makes FA such as Michael Jordan—all of a sudden a ton of WikiProjects, who had little to nothing to do with making it anything, come and slap their tag on it. I would say if a WikiProject doesn't do significant work on an article that should serve as a factor also, here's a tool that can help determine that:[1] That should also be a factor in some way, especially if the connection is tenuous. Quadzilla99 01:42, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Editors make FAs, not WikiProjects, but editors may still use WikiProjects to aid in that. So you can't really measure something like that, so it would be impossible to make it a "requirement". I don't care if some WikiProject comes after the FA status, but I do care if a WikiProject doesn't have the potential to add anything. For example, lets say WikiProject Shoes tags the MJ page because of his line of shoes. In all reality, that won't be of much help to the article. -- Ned Scott 02:01, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Not really scope related, but what's with Wikipedia:WikiProject League of Copyeditors tagging talk pages? -- Ned Scott 02:08, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

They tag pages which have been requested for copyediting and if they are in the process of copyediting it (or haev copyedited portions of it) they add the tag to the talk page. After it's done it goes in side the banner. Quadzilla99 02:31, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally, I disagree with your comments above, if several members of WikiProject Chicago got together and collaberated on the Jordan article based on conversations had at the WIkiProject, then it would be deserving of the project banner obviously, which is what I'm referring to. If a fringe project has done no work on the article their banner should go. Quadzilla99 02:34, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
This has nothing to do with "deserving". If WikiProject Chicago is working as a tool that helps that article, then great. At the same time I don't think it's fair to say that projects should be proven tools ahead of time before tagging, only that they realistically be likely good tools. -- Ned Scott 07:54, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Wow, the wording on that sounds all retarded now that I look at it, but hopefully you guys get what I was getting at. -- Ned Scott 08:47, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Is what I said that hard to follow? I meant deserve in the sense that it rightfully belonged on there—as in the Project had improved the article and hence the article was part of the project—not that it doesn't deserve to be on there because it's an honor to be on an FA page. By your logic the Chicago Project could make Jordan their collaberation of the month and get it to FA and it wouldn't belong on there. Quadzilla99 15:51, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
The only question that comes to mind is whether the given projects might do something other than improve articles. For instance, as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Saints, I have performed several reversions of vandalism or POV edits on the Martin Luther page, almost exclusively because the article appears on the project's recent changes page. (He's included in the Calendar of Saints (Lutheran), if you're wondering how he qualifies as under the project's scope, by the way.) The question that comes to mind is whether any of these other projects might be engaged in the same "oversight" activity. If yes, then I can see no real objections to their adding a banner, even if on a practical basis there may be few if any such oversight actions to perform on a given page. If no, then clearly there is a problem. Also, if any page is to appear on a list of articles which a given project maintains, then that project would reasonably have some interest in maintaining and tagging that article. And I do think that maybe creating a few "categorical" banners, like someone has done for several religious projects on the Talk:Jerusalem page, might be a good idea as well, if we can talk people into making such banners. John Carter 14:38, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

I've been giving more thought to Kirill's comment to me, where he said "...we need tagging reform, not scope reform." While I still think the ideas and concerns being expressed are valid, calling this a "scope" issue probably isn't accurate (well, maybe for some situations, but not as a broad fix). I would still like to get WikiProjects to think more about their neighbor projects, and to avoid needless double tagging when a page is barely under one project, but definitely under another. At the same time we could still make it easy to find both WikiProjects from the talk page of the said article, but hopefully without stuffing the directly relevant project in a box with everyone else. And get WikiProjects to think about their neighbors not just for tagging, but collaboration and seeking similar issues and ideas, to make us more efficient. -- Ned Scott 06:24, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I can certainly see how, for instance, using my previous example, the Martin Luther talk page should have the Lutheranism banner as the top banner, with the various other projects which have an interest in the article (Biography, Christianity, Saints, Germany, whatever else) below that. Maybe, in those cases where the most applicable banner is clearly obvious, we could even "single out" the top priority banner as the display banner, and place the remainder in the {{WikiProject Banners}} template. The only questions that come to mind are when the most applicable project either doesn't have a banner, or doesn't engage in assessments. However, as it is apparent that not all projects which are created and engage in assessment either actively edit all the articles they tag, or even really stay active, and it is unfortunately difficult to know in advance which projects will become inactive, I can see how having the banners in place provide a "back-up" system in the event that the primary project becomes moribund or is even deleted. John Carter 14:07, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
As a possible solution. In this case, I will continue to use Martin Luther, which might well be the least effective example of what I am proposing, but I would welcome any input on how to address the possible problem. Perhaps we could propose as a guideline that only those projects which have either through their banners or otherwise declared a given article to be of "Top" importance (or the equivalent for Biography and other groups) would have their banners displayed separately. In this instance, given that Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team is less a project in the traditional sense than a banner indicating that a given article has been included in a release version, its single banner might not be included in this grouping. Anyway, by doing so any projects which are tied to a specific subject, however tangentially, could still have their banners on the page, with relevant assessments or whatever, but only those whose interest in the article is such that they have allocated it "top importance" or the equivalent would be displayed individually. By doing so, someone interested in editing articles dealing with that article's general subject would first see the Projects whose work most closely deals with the given article, and also see the others, if, for whatever reason, they are interested in a given article on the basis of its ties to that particular subject. I acknowledge that there might be difficulties in enforcing such a standard, particularly for newer projects, and in the case of articles like Martin Luther it really doesn't solve anything, given that importance of that article in a number of areas, but it is at least a step toward resolving that problem. John Carter 00:29, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I like this idea. I can see this working for the majority of multi-banner situations. -- Ned Scott 01:13, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Membership authority

My view is that project members should place the project template on the talk page of any article/page they think is applicable under the project's scope. If the project has absolutely nothing to do with the article, then it should be removed by anyone. But, if it's arguable whether it's applicable, it should be initially kept and a discussion on the project's talk page started to seek a consensus from participants/members of the project on whether the article truly fits within the scope. I myself have experienced only several cases (amongst hundreds, if not, thousands of placements) where project banners were challenged, with only one case where my head was basically beaten in over the placement, even though there was a glaringly clear connection to the project's scope. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 02:55, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Such discussion is not simply closed to all but those who list themselves as participants or members. Anyone can bring it to discussion. Banners are not about "what we can categorize, they are about helping the article. If placing a banner on an article helps it, great. If placing a banner on an article does nothing but add clutter, not great. -- Ned Scott 03:09, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I do understand that you assert these points as your opinion. It is indeed generally up to project members to make the scope determination, as after all, they know more than others how the scope is defined -- if one wants to join in that conversation, they are more than welcome, but the decision is ultimately up to the project. And while projects are certainly about helping the article, they are for a lot more than that, including a different kind of categorization for project-related purposes, such as development prioritizing, assessment, change patrol, etc. (all which also help articles and the overall Wikipedia project). I am frankly amazed that you continue to think that I think that article cataloging is about traditional categorization. Maybe it's time to drop this straw man? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 03:24, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Stevie, get over yourself, I'm talking in general about people categorizing articles for scopes. If you take the time to look, it's usually my general complaint about many projects.
As far as the "authority" of "members", it's not really like that. Rather, the more likely situation is that such editors will simply be more persuasive since they are more familiar with said topic, and not because they put their name on a list. Wikipedians are not required to list themselves to join, participate, or make decisions in WikiProjects.
This is how I've described Participation and "membership" on a number of WikiProjects:
"Technically speaking, anyone who edits / contributes to X articles is a participant, and there are no requirements other than that. If one wishes they can further identify themselves with the project by listing their name as a participant. This helps spread the word about the project and can help other editors see what types of articles that user is interested in editing."
We want to preserve both the group identity and community feeling, while also making groups more open and inviting for other users, and helping WikiProjects avoid needless isolation. A balance between the "group" feeling and still being open is what it's all about. Being open in discussions and decisions is better for everyone. -- Ned Scott 03:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what is meant by "categorizing articles for scopes". If you mean categorizing outside the project scope, then I agree, that's a no-no. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
As far as participation with respect to working on articles catalogued by the project, you are absolutely correct. With regards to project business and decision-making, we remain in total disagreement. I'm afraid that an assertion is unconvincing to me. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
In the case you state, the individuals are valued Wikipedians working on articles catalogued by the X project, and this is absolutely welcome and encouraged, but unless they actually join the project, they aren't members. Sorry, but this is a clear logical line. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
WikiProjects are very open to membership, and projects do virtually nothing but encourage Wikipedians within the project or not within the project to work on articles catalogued by the project. It's slap-easy to join wikiprojects, so if one wants to help out with project processes and decision-making, joining is a very easy logical line to cross. If that is not welcoming, I don't know what is. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:31, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
If you look we've been phasing out even using the word "membership" for most WikiProjects. The idea that you have to join, or that there is an actual "membership" doesn't help anything, and can easily be a turn off to many editors. WikiProjects are not clubs. Some WikiProjects operate with concepts like project leaders, but even then that still doesn't mean that "non-members" have no voice. Making "joining" a requirement to discuss such things helps nothing and only leads to needless bureaucracy. It will never be a requirement that someone has to join a WikiProject in order to discuss and take part in project operation and decisions, and that's just the way it is. -- Ned Scott 04:40, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
There was a category renaming question a while back about whether to make every project use the term "participant". This failed, and I believe that was due to the concept of maintaining respect for the autonomy of the various wikiprojects.
Again, everything you say is an assertion. There are no policies or guidelines that you present to back up your position. Each project can decide which degree of regimentation or decision-making process it will adhere to, and I assure you, projects I work with are far more open than some others. That said, nobody can reasonably expect to participate in internal project decision-making unless they are a member, *unless* a project states otherwise -- that's the only out I'm giving you. Just because you want it to work differently won't automatically make it so. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:48, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
nobody can reasonably expect to participate in internal project decision-making unless they are a member - wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. I don't need to join wikipedia to edit. An anon IP editor has as much say as me about article content - this is a principle that should apply to projects too. Dan Beale 12:02, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
It's not up to the project, and it's not just my assertion. Did you miss the WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY link? There's a big ass policy link for you. How about Wikipedia:Consensus or WP:OWN? This is how it's always been, and I'm sorry that you've developed this misunderstanding of how WikiProjects work. -- Ned Scott 04:53, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Although, that is not to say that WikiProjects are not allowed to "run themselves". I'm only saying that other editors are not required to be "members" to participate if they desire. -- Ned Scott 05:00, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh, and the category renaming didn't "fail". Saying such things makes the suggestion that there was opposition to the proposition, when this really wasn't the case. It was simply a matter of lack of input. -- Ned Scott 05:02, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
  • There was an earlier issue about this, where a handful of Wikiproject members asserted that since they had discussed and reached consensus on some matter, the broader discussion involving more editors was somehow invalid. This eventually came down to arbitration and was a nasty affair for most of the involved. Bottom line is that Wikiprojects don't WP:OWN articles or categories or whatnot, and that "non-members" have equal "status" and can discuss anything they like. Aside from that, Wikiprojects don't have requirements for membership, so if some policy wonk says that you can't join the talk because "you're not a member", you could technically just declare yourself a member then and there and continue talking. But that would be jumping through hoops, and we don't do hoops. Aside from that, edit warring over a "wikiproject" tag on some article talk page is really WP:LAME. >Radiant< 11:49, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some related points

  • For an example of overtagging, or rather a complaint about overtagging, see my comments here. In particular, the points I am making is that pointless out-of-scope overtagging just makes more work for a WikiProject to do and detracts from the work that could be done on articles of central importance to that WikiProject. Sometimes it feels like the WikiProject tagging is just mirroring the category tagging that is done on the articles... Carcharoth 16:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
    • In many projects that do assessments, they also assign importance with the importance parameter -- this allows them to put their concentration where it's needed most in terms of article development, while still providing oversight (e.g., reverting vandalism, updating as events happen, etc.) over all the articles under their scope. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 23:21, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Small, inactive, obviously subsidiary WikiProjects can easily be dealt with by moving to a subpage of an active WikiProject. For an example of this, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth/WikiProject Silmarillion and the MfD. The idea is that inactive projects could be merged into active ones without the bureaucracy of an MfD. Just check out a few links, see if there is any activity or members, and then carry out the move. Carcharoth 16:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually, speaking from experience, in several cases I have been involved in project tagging literally does reflect categorization. Personally, I can (and do) at least try to justify this on the basis that if an earlier editor of the page saw it as being sufficient to include in a specific category (I generally don't add categories and banner myself), then presumably it's enough to tag the article with the specific banner. I acknowledge that this can and does often go to far, but, with the increasing proliferation of smaller, more subject-specific projects, it seems to me to be at least to a degree reasonable as well. This is not to say that I can easily see that a banner (or category) might not be removed or changed later, but at least by doing this we are at least drawing attention to the often hard-to-follow categorization that we are I think finding increasingly often. John Carter 16:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Hard-to-follow categorisation? If it is hard to follow, it needs fixing, surely? And the tagging will have been a waste of time, especially if people don't realise it was due to inappropriate categorisation. Carcharoth 16:43, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Banning automated tagging of talk pages based on categories would help. Simple rule of thumb - only tag a page if you can assess the relevance to the WikiProject at the same time. Much better to go through a category and weed out the irrelevant ones and create a clean list for a bot, rather than over-tag. Sadly, I think many people just bot-tag away on whole categories without thinking about it. Carcharoth 16:45, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe one of the best examples of what I'm describing that I've seen yet is Category:Religion in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Right now, we've got the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg included in daughter categories of Category:Amish and Category:Mennonitism, which would probably really surprise members of the diocese there. Now, in this case, I haven't tagged any of the articles in this category because I know it's, well, itself oddly categorized. But there could be several others which are less reasonable. Certainly, if someone were to contact me or a project regarding an article I tagged and I couldn't justify it, I would (I think/hope) remove the banner, and try to change the categorization to at least make it less inexact. If that's done right, the article might then also get some recognition by someone in that project and maybe draw the attention of the appropriate goup(s) of editors. John Carter 16:52, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject scope

Thread moved from Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Biography#Banner --kingboyk 23:17, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I am getting the WP:WPChi assessment division started using techniques learned while briefly contributing to your Feb bio unassessed article tagging drive. In the last 3 weeks we have gone from 400 articles to 7500 articles. Yesterday, I was helping a user solve talk page clutter problems at Ella Cara Deloria after a bot kept tagging a talk page and the user kept trying to remove our tag. It came to my attention that WP Bio seems to be using a possibly outdated format for some of its parameters. In particular, I believe the photo and living persons (and possibly the autostubbing) banners are formatted to produce more clutter than necessary. E.g., on the aforementioned page in order to work out a clutter solution I removed the "needs-photo = yes" parameter and put it in the {{ChicagoWikiProject}} banner. Later, I realized that this is probably not the best solution because if projects do this every time a talk page is cluttered with your parameterized banner you will begin to lose your hard work and the information from the categorization facilitated by such parameters. My suggestion is to change your parameters to appear as lines within the banner instead of as additional banners.

Also, I was curious why WP Bio does not use the analogue to our Category:Disambig-Class Chicago articles, which would be Category:Disambig-Class biography articles. It would seem this would be a useful category and could be easily populated with a bot looking for WP Bio tagged articles that have {{hndis}} or {{disamb}}. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 15:26, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

7500 Chicago articles? Are you sure all those are strictly relevant to Chicago? I had a look at the unassessed articles and found Aaron Downey. He played ice hockey in Chicago at some point in his career. He doesn't come from Chicago. How can WP:WPChi really hope to assess the article? It would be better to concentrate on the 400 initial articles, which I will guess were more focused on Chicago. At the very least, I hope Mr Downey get a very low importance rating for his article's relevance to WikiProject Chicago. This reminds me of when characters from Tolkien's books were getting tagged by the film wikiproject because they featured in the film of the book. Pointless over-tagging. BTW, this is more a general diatribe, and not really directed at you or WP:WPChi. Please don't get personally offended, but I do wish people didn't see going from 400 to 7500 articles as a good thing. It just makes more work for you and detracts from the work that could be done on articles of central importance to WP:WPChi. Carcharoth 15:50, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
The bot is about half way through. We will end up with much more in our domain. Obviously, by adding every player who has ever played for a Chicago professional sports team we will get our share of Aaron Downeys and Lawrence Funderburkes. However, adding importance=low to them will remedy this. The biggest problem comes from the Chicago Area University alumni categories. I still think they properly fall under our domain. I am not sure if Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities has any policy on such issues, but after we get our articles tagged and send a bot to look for WP:FAs and WP:GAs within our list we will probably be pleasantly surprised. The bot will also autostub for us. Clearly many low importance articles will be autostubbed. Take a look at the WP Chi categories page. Basically, everything in one of the Category:Chicago, Illinois and its subcategories (except those under Category:Chicago railroads will be tagged. In addition, everything in Category:Cook County, Illinois and all statewide officials categories will be tagged. Let me know what categories you don't think we should be tagging if you have any advice. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 18:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
The bot? In your domain? Seriously. Stop. And. Think. What is the point in generating a huge category like this? And "low importance articles will be autostubbed"? Please tell me I misread that? Low importance has nothing to do with whether something is a stub. Why not get a group of people (not bots) to go through the list and manually select the ones most relevant to WikiProject Chicago? The ones that you will be able to productively and efficiently spend time on. What the bot is currently producing for you will have to be looked over by people anyway, and when they stick "importance=low" on lots of the articles, they are effectively saying "no, we won't have time to work on this article". It is much more efficent to use the categories to generate a first pass list. Then to have a small group go through the list and select the ones that fall within the domain of WikiProject Chicago (preferably people who live there and can judge this sort of thing). And then assess those. Thousands and thousands of articles just overwhelms things. Start small and work up from there. Carcharoth 21:18, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
I should probably be more constructive in my criticism after what I wrote above (sorry, I was in a rather bad mood concerning over-tagging). I've looked at the Chicago category structure you pointed me too, and it looks very nice. Any fixed structure (building etc) is obviously fine, along with teams and companies based in Chicago. Basically, anything geographical can fall within the purview of a geographical wikiproject. People though, I would seriously advise should be manually looked at. If they have spent most of their life in Chicago, or are famous for being from Chicago, then yes, add them. But not a Hollywood star who grew up in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles. And if there are any pages better tackled by other WikiProjects, there is no need to tag them. If there is a Due South WikiProject, leave those articles to them. If there are baseball/ice hockey/football wikiprojects, leave those articles to them. The team articles, tag, but not the individual player articles. I'd avoid the alumi categories altogether. Carcharoth 21:27, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
The thing is a Hollywood star who grew up in Chicago is still well within the project. Glance at the first three bios in Category:People from Wilmette, Illinois for example (Lester Crown was just added so skip him when counting the first 3). I think Chicagoans would care about these people. I am in the very early stages of this task. I have not yet determined what I will do with all these articles. The first task here is just taking inventory. If an article includes a category indicating relevance we take it. This is not a cut and dry thing like whether an article is a bio or not. I have overstepped my bounds in a few cases. E.G., Nancy Reagan grew up in Chicago. Her article lists her in Category:People from New York City and Category:People from Queens, but it does not list her in any Chicago categories. However, I have decided to give article has a WikiProject Chicago banner and although it does not have a WikiProject New York City one. I think we will care about her article.TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 22:53, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
It depends what you mean by "within" the project. I've always seen articles being "within" a project if all sections of the article concern that WIkiProject. If the WikiProject would only be concerned with a section of the article (eg. the time a person spent in Chicago), then it doesn't feel right to mark it as part of that WikiProject. List it somewhere as of peripheral importance, but that should be different from low importance. Article categories allow you to find articles to check the Chicago-related content of articles, but ones tagged for a WikiProject to deal with should be largely to do with Chicago, not just tangentially related. The tagging shouldn't be a way of generating a list for the WikiProject of all articles realated to Chicago - the article categories already do that. The tagging should be picking out the articles that the WikiProject can usefully spend time assessing and writing/improving. Carcharoth 23:10, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm with Carcharoth on this one. It's not a matter of anything remotely related to the WikiProject, it's about what articles the Wikiproject can realistically help as a tool and as a group of editors. The whole point is to narrow down the amount of pages and focus on them, so broadening the scope to such very minor articles is actually counter productive. -- Ned Scott 23:40, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
So basically, even if it can fall within a project, we should consider "does it help to put this under this project", instead. -- Ned Scott 23:42, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree with that sentiment. Wikiprojects exist to aid articles, not the other way around. If the page already falls under a couple more relevant projects, and there is no reason that a person looking at the page would want to contact your project, then slapping a banner on it just because you can is rather pointless. On the other hand, if an article was only minorly related to your project but had no other (active) projects that it fell under, then putting your wikiproject banner there could indeed be helpful since people who had problems with the article would have a place to look for assistance. --tjstrf talk 00:48, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
The problem with the entire article philosophy is that for regional projects, most people have contributed to several regions. Michael Jordan spent important parts of his life in North Carolina and in Chicago. By your definition neither could claim him as within their project. Similarly, Roger Clemens has won Cy Young Awards in Toronto, Boston, New York and possibly Houston (if I recall correctly). To say that no project can claim him as their own because his article is clearly a Biography article and not within any one region is ridiculous. A regional project should claim bio articles where a reasonably sized select group within the region might want to look the subject up in an encyclopedia. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 14:11, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

(unindent) I think you are still confusing article categories with WikiProject tagging. If people from Chicago want to look up articles related to Chicago, they can use search engines and browse using portals, the Wikipedia category system, or just by starting from the article Chicago. Wikiprojects are not for helping people find Chicago-related articles per se (though the related Portal:Chicago is useful there). Rather, WikiProjects are places for editors (not readers) to collaborate on articles that contain large amounts of content about Chicago, and which they can contribute a lot towards. Thus the scope should, as Ned says, be narrowed to focus editing efforts. I realise you realise this, and you intend to narrow the scope, but starting with a wide scope and then narrowing it is an inefficient way to proceed. The narrowing will have to be done by humans anyway, so why not make that the first step? As an example, Nancy Reagan and Michael Jordan could appear on Portal:Chicago, with short blurbs rewritten especially to focus on their time in Chicago, but new editors arriving at WP:WPChi are more likely to want to help out with editing History of Chicago, or assessing articles related to Geography of Chicago. Again, apologies for picking out WP:WPChi as an example, but this is something a lot of WikiProjects seem to do. They like to cast their net as wide as possible and are pleased when the net brings back thousands of articles for them to assess and read and look at. A better way to proceed is to look at the number of active participants (I count about 75 members for WP:WPChi - how many are active?), and find an amount of work that fits the number of people available to do the work. Then expand later. Carcharoth 12:42, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Basically, your suggestion is a managerial style issue. If you look at Category:Top-importance Chicago articles, you will see included biographies of people who are not lifelong Chicagoans (Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey & Jesse Jackson). I still believe they are among our highest priority Chicago articles. My approach will be to tag as much as possible by bot and then get the bot to autostub, and identify GAs and FAs. We will find a lot of interesting things this way. Right now our WP:CHICOTW is running out of good projects to work on because we don't know what is out there to work on. This effort will help. I view the importance tag as a signal of where to expend editorial efforts and will attempt to use it in this manner. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 14:22, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
OK. We will have to agree to disagree on those people you mention being relevant to WP:WPChi, but good luck with your efforts at finding articles for WP:WPChi to collaborate on. Don't get too caught up in assigning low importance to irrelevant (to WP:WPChi) articles - my advice is too concentrate on identifying the high and top importance ones first. ie. Don't set as a goal the assessment of 7000+ articles, but first identify a core groups of 1000 or so articles, assess those, and start work on those. Assessing the 6000+ unassessed articles can be left until later. Good luck with prioritising this sort of thing! Carcharoth 15:10, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Once the bot completes its first pass, we will send it back to identify articles already evaluated as FA and GA on other banners. This should be a great start to that end. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 18:37, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tier 3?

  • Tiers: I've been fiddling with Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide and not realising all this other discussion was going on (call me stupid :) ), but I came up with a Tier 3 as well (called "Topic Co-ordination" on that page).

-- TimNelson 06:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Task forces/Work Groups/Tier 2 ideas

Here are my various ideas on task forces:

  • Core topics task forces: A problem I've run into with WikiProject Calvinism (which would've happened even if it'd been a task force) is that often there are articles like Salvation which need attention from someone in our project, but could also be covered by a number of other projects, like Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Christianity, Jesus, and the like (yes, these are all WikiProjects). With a "Core topics" task force of eg. the Christianity WikiProject, we could leave all these topics untagged, but still know that they needed attention because they're under "Core topics", without having to worry about getting lost in a sea of articles that are irrelevant (eg. Icons are irrelevant to Calvinism, even though they're an important part of Christianity of some other kinds).
  • Autonomy: If we let the task forces be more autonomous (ie. give them design control over their own page, etc), and limit the demands on them to something minimal (ie. must have parent project navigation bar), then that will make them happier, and make things seem like less of a downgrade.

-- TimNelson 07:14, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Just as an additional comment, until recently I never joined WikiProjects because I thought it meant I was promising to work on them, rather than just help out from time to time. I'd like to find a name for task forces that expresses this. I think that, rather than "task forces" (WPMILHIST) or "Work Groups" (WPBIO), the name "Interest Group" (or maybe Special Interest Group, aka SIG) would be better.
-- TimNelson 13:45, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inactive WikiProjects

I'm all in favour of not forcing projects to do anything, but I think that a few policy-related things may be useful. Did you know that in the last 2 months, the number of inactive WikiProjects has gone from 192 to 257? At this rate (assuming a constant rate, rather than exponential), in 2 years, we will have 720 inactive WikiProjects! Here's my policy recommendations

  • Very inactive WikiProjects (where we need to define a standard for "very inactive") should be allowed to be abducted and forcibly converted to task forces
  • People should not be allowed to create WikiProjects in areas that are already covered by a task force, unless they have the consensus of the task force (apparently there has already been problems with this with Wikipedia:WikiProject Chattanooga vs. Wikipedia:WikiProject Tennessee, although this has been resolved, basically the suggested policy would have resulted anyway).
  • Require that all new WikiProjects to be proposed on the WikiProjects proposals page, and that links to the proposal be posted on any appropriate parent WikiProjects' talk pages. After all, we do this for stub categories.
    • In the proposal, have them define the Tier of the project, with a link to the Guide for more information.

I'd also suggest that a project be considered "very inactive" when all of the following are true:

  • It has had an "Inactive" banner on its page for over 2 months, and fits the "Inactive" criteria
  • It is missing one of: assessment, outreach, OR it covers less than 10 articles
  • Nobody objects in 3 days after you propose turning the WikiProject into a task force
  • A task force is the appropriate size for the project (I mention this because of World music, which lacked an outreach program, but is still too large to make a sensible task force)

-- TimNelson 06:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inter-WikiProject co-ordination/Tier 0/Proposals

I'd suggest that, once we have the tiers thing sorted out more, we get rid of the current Proposals page, and instead have separate proposals pages at each Tier 0 WikiProject (and maybe the Tier 1 ones too). I think that would get more and better gauging of interest and discussion than the current system.

-- TimNelson 07:25, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minimum requirements for Tier 1 projects?

As an alternative (and in conjunction with the Task force autonomy comment above), I'd like to suggest that maybe there should be some minimum requirements for a WikiProject, as follows:

Required for all Tier 0 and Tier 1 projects:

  • A proposals page
  • An assessment setup

Required for all Tier 1 projects:

  • An outreach page
  • A list of tasks to do
  • A list of members

Any project that doesn't have the above within 30 days can be abducted and turned into a task force. I mean, really, if they can't be bothered doing those things, they should be AfD, not inactive WikiProjects.

-- TimNelson 07:25, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, not all WikiProjects use assessments, but the general idea isn't bad. -- Ned Scott 07:33, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Can you give me an example? I'm interested to see what they do instead -- TimNelson 07:39, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, there's not-directly-article projects like WikiProject Free images, and there's also projects like WP:STARGATE that don't currently use assessments (but they could). -- Ned Scott 07:44, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Hmm, I see what you mean. How about we only require assessment setups of Tier 0 projects, but then require a more expansive task list from Tier 1 projects (ie. tasks must include at least 12 articles from at least 4 of the following classes: Requests, Wikify, Stubs, ... (the usual) or other reasonable classes). Would that work? Hmm. That still leaves Free Images in the dark. What about if we have those requirements for topic-based projects, but not ones like Free Images? -- TimNelson 07:59, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
Blanket requirements probably won't work, but maybe if we set up some kind of "WikiProject review" as an alternative to MfDs, etc. A review would even be a positive thing, as any project could be reviewed just to help get on track or to improve themselves. -- Ned Scott 03:32, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I think blanket requirements could work in one of two ways. One way would be to make the standards fairly minimal (ie. the stuff above, but only what works for all projects, including Free Images, so not the assessment stuff), or the other way is, have a list of requirements, and have a review process for projects that don't meet the requirements. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by TimNelson (talk • contribs) 23:57, 7 May 2007 (UTC).
I could agree to having some minimum requirements, but those proposed seem to me to be possibly questionable. My ideas would be
  • Tier 0 rarely uses a banner - such projects should be only those which have a number of different projects within the same area which basically "split away" most of the content. Probably could have a banner, with tabs for other groups in it, but might not need assessments if all their content is under the scope of other projects which do do assessments. Excellent place to conduct peer review or collaboration, though.
  • Maybe make a Tier I project one that has a minimum number of relevant articles or required articles (some multiple of 1000 or more). These projects should develop assessments within perhaps a month of creation, possibly have peer review and/or collaboration (depending on whether there is a relevant Tier 0 projects). I want to stipulate here that creating an article for every character in a TV show to reaach the 1000 articles or more probably wouldn't reach the standard of "required" articles. Yeah, I know that's vague, put phrasing ain't my strong point.
  • Tier 2 projects have and are expected to have no more than 1000 articles. They would tend to utilize the banner of some larger project. They could engage in collaboration, but would probably leave peer review and assessment to larger projects.
  • Anyway, I'm not thinking real clearly right now, so I'm sure each of the above is at least reasonably arguable. Feel free to rip into the proposals above. John Carter 00:08, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Tier 0 and assessment: The article says "In particular, they will not engage in article tagging except in cases where no more suitable descendant project's tag is available". My thought was that this could be used as a system to try to locate areas that are not covered by WikiProjects.
  • Tier 1 and assessment: I guess my thought is that if we raise the bar for Tier 1 WikiProjects, people will be less likely to create them. In my case, it was easy -- people joined so quickly after I created the project that by the time I got around to investigating an Assessment setup, it was already done by someone else :). I don't want to raise the bar too high, but some inactive WikiProjects were whims, not projects.
  • I don't think it's useful to limit the number of articles in tier 2. I'd like to see Tier 2 have at least the option of their own assessment systems, like WPMILHIST does.
  • I'm mainly interested in the crtieria as a way of deciding which projects need the full infrastructure themselves, and which would operate better as task forces.
-- TimNelson 02:01, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
My apologies for my earlier poor phrasing. Personally, I think that the Tier 2 projects would probably use a banner which may well allow them their own assessment criteria, even if they do use the banner of some larger project. And, certainly, it might be possible that depending on the size of the larger Tier 1, a Tier 2 may well have more than 1000 articles. Certainly, if Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa were to form national subprojects, I would hope most of them would have more than 1000 articles. In cases like that, though, it might make sense for them to eventually split off "on their own." John Carter 02:19, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Sure. I'm trying to keep the list short and mandatory here :). I'll make a revised list -- TimNelson 14:11, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minimum requirements for Tier 0 & 1 projects? (take 2)

As an alternative (and in conjunction with the Task force autonomy comment above), I'd like to suggest that maybe there should be some minimum requirements for a WikiProject, as follows:

Required for all Tier 0 and Tier 1 projects:

Required for all Tier 1 projects:

  • Outreach page/section
  • Todo list
  • List of members
  • List of related WikiProjects
  • Statement of goals
  • Sections for Scope, Departments, and Guidelines (even if the sections are almost empty)
  • Any project over 50 members must also have a tier 2/task force support structure

A project would have 2 months to get all this in place. --

I'll argue in favour of some of the changes now:

  • If people haven't bothered to find out what WikiProjects are related, the project needs to be tied in with something else
  • If there's no statement of goals, the project isn't doing anything
  • The tier 2/task force requirement is to make it so that WikiProjects don't proliferate so much

-- TimNelson 14:11, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, if these were the conditions of a project continuing to exist, I would probably have no real objections. However, I do think that we would want to allow any new project at least a month or two, potentially, to have all its structure in place before demanding these things. And I could certainly see having some sort of official "review" policy, which could potentially include outside assistance, in ensuring projects meet these criteria. John Carter 14:20, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
(Note: Have since modified proposal to include startup time -- TimNelson 15:07, 9 May 2007 (UTC))
The fact that no existing project actually meets all of these requirements might suggest—at least to me—that they're a bit over the top. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 14:36, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
No? Well, the only one that Wikipedia:WikiProject Calvinism doesn't meet is the "Proposals" one, and that mainly because we don't have a task force infrastructure yet. But I can fix that if you like :). I've added a note about some of the sections being empty. And after a quick check, WP:BIO and WP:MILHIST also appear to comply. But to go for a much lower activity one, the World music WikiProject (with which I'm also involved) complies with all of these except (again) the proposals page. My conclusion is that you must be interpreting some of the line items differently than me; if you're willing to highlight which ones you think that projects don't comply with, I'll try to explain that further
--TimNelson
Okay, fair enough:
  • Proposals page: as far as I know, no project actually has a dedicated page set up for this; and, frankly, I can't imagine why it would be a good idea. Projects should not be dealing with a sufficiently high-volume stream of such requests that a separate page would be needed; in other cases, the higher traffic of the main discussion page would make that the preferred location for dealing with issues like this.
  • Outreach department: this is essentially a miscellaneous holding area for various sorts of (highly optional) fluff; why would we want to require it? ("Outreach" is not rigorously defined, in any case; it could be used to mean just about anything.)
  • Sections for ...: pointless if the sections are empty, I think.
  • Task force support: at a certain point, a project is sufficiently granular that further splitting doesn't make sense. Making a blanket requirement that projects with a certain (membership) size must create further subdivisions isn't going to work; in many cases, there's no natural sub-area that could actually sustain a smaller group.
Kirill Lokshin 16:00, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Proposals page: Sure, I know no projects have a dedicated page for this. I guess what I'm really thinking is, I think the proposals process would work better if it were managed on the pages of the parent WikiProject(s), rather than on a central page, and I was trying to think of a good way of doing this. Maybe it'd be better to just have them proposed on the project's general talk page. So I guess I'm retracting my proposal for a proposals page, but still proposing a new proposals structure.
  • Outreach: I think that, in general, outreach is relatively important for getting new members and communicating with them. Without these, a project dies, and gets added to the Inactive Projects list
  • Blank sections: Good point. I've changed it to "almost empty". I guess my point is that I think these things need some work, and I'm hoping that the mere presence of the sections means that someone, sometime, will fill them in
  • Task force support: That's why I'm only proposing that tier 0 and tier 1 WikiProjects have task force support. Tier 2 projects don't need it. In fact, we could make that the determining criterion; could this project someday have subprojects? If the answer is no, then they're a tier 2 project.
-- TimNelson 23:42, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
I think tying the tier determination to a question of pure size is going to make reform go down in flames, given that the assumption all along has been that well-functioning small projects would not be forcibly task-force-ified in cases where the structure didn't make sense. Most obviously, projects that are focused enough that they don't have any easily constrained sub-areas, but that couldn't become Tier 2 projects because they don't have a natural parent project to play Tier 1 project to them would thus be left in limbo.
(Conversely, if you're including even unreasonable or trivial potential sub-projects, then this simply becomes useless.) Kirill Lokshin 18:17, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Definitely not including trivial sub-projects. Yeah, I take your point. -- TimNelson 00:04, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
In response to John Carter, I'm not so keen on a review structure -- If a non-compliant WikiProject is found, some sort of notice could be put on the page with a note about the requirements, and if the requirements aren't fulfilled within a month of the notice being placed, the page can be abducted and turned into a task force/tier 2.
-- TimNelson 15:07, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
As I have stated elsewhere, I think that having some sort of review structure, if only for listing a project on the Project Directory and elsewhere, might be a good idea in that it ensures we don't have people creating whole projects when their efforts duplicate existing projects and/or have some degree of demonstrable support. If we indicated that projects which don't meet certain objective criteria will not be included in the directory, I could see that working too. In any event, if there were such a process which would ensure that projects which are created are at least reasonably well founded, I don't think that would be a bad thing. Maybe just requesting that all projects, before created, get listed on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals page would ensure that any new projects are at least competently put together. John Carter 16:41, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Sure, with the exception that I want to make the proposals process a responsibility of the individual WikiProjects, so I'd say they should be proposed on eg. the talk page of the parent WikiProjects.
-- TimNelson 23:42, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] why have banners at all?

its very annoying to see article's "talk" button in blue, expecting there to be some discussion there, only to discover some wikiproject banners - you have just wasted your click. the banners provide very little benefit, and could easily be replaced by lists held in the wikiproject's space instead of spamming every article's talk page. 86.31.103.208 12:51, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

The point is to allow those reviewing such articles an easy way to switch from the article page to an "assessment" page. Rather than have more tabs at the top, the assessement schemes seem to have been tied into the talk page tab, rather than having their own tabs. Given the amount of effort spent on this, I'd actually welcome talk pages becoming talk pages again, and banners and whatnot put on a separate page. So you'd have the a tab (bolded):
  • Article
  • Discussion
  • Assessments
  • Edit this page
  • History
  • Watch
But that is such a radical change, it would need far-reaching and widespread discussion, beyond the scope of this discussion here. Carcharoth 13:49, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I've frequently seen the suggestion to create a "Meta" tab that would contain all of the information about the article (project banners, peer review notices, GA and FA banners as appropriate, etc.), while discussion about the article's content would remain on "Talk". I don't know how far along these discussions are, but the devs have heard it. Slambo (Speak) 14:12, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Not heard that one before, but I think it's an excellent idea. My own idea long ago was to change the colour of the Discussion tab if the talk page contained only templates. --kingboyk 13:49, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
I will have to also support this idea. There should be an additional space for meta-info other than actual discussion. Greg Bard 04:21, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP Chicago

I have assumed the role of the Director of the Chicago Project, which has begun tagging articles with {{ChicagoWikiProject}}. This is a newly active project. In order to quickly assess all the thousands of articles within the domain of the project I have created a list of categories that I am having a bot tag. A bot is adding the tag to virtually all articles and subcategories that fall under either Category:Chicago, Illinois or Category:Cook County, Illinois and a few other categories except for some subcategories of Category:Chicago railroads that will likely be manually tagged. As you can see the greatest difficulty is the structure of the Chicago railroads category. Although for some time Chicago was the nexus of railroad transportation this category is quite problematic. Most of the subcategories contain fewer than 80% articles that are relevant for WP:WPChi. It is the only category structured in a way that causes such a problem. Its parent category Category:Illinois railroads is one of 50 state by state categories structured in this way within its parent Category:Railway_companies_of_the_United_States. This category is basically structured in a way that is akin Category:Industry by states in which they provide service with each state containing categories of Category:Industry members by state in which they provide services. The problem is that these categories include predecessor companies that did not provide service in that state and both lines and locomotives that served other states.

Is there any chance that the category could be reorganized or an alternate hierarchy could be established to make it friendly to regional bot tagging. I imagine that in the future many regional projects would want something that a bot could handle analogous to:

Railroad companies headquartered in Chicago a sub cat of Category:Companies based in Chicago
Railroad companies providing service in Chicago a sub cat of Category:Transportation in Chicago
Railroad routes reaching Chicago Category:Transportation in Chicago
Railroad trains/lines serving Chicago Category:Transportation in Chicago

- TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 14:35, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree the Category:Chicago railroads is misleading at the moment. It should be all railroads in (or passing through) Chicago. It seems to me to be more like a 'history of the Chicago railroad companies' category. I suggest you find the Railroad WikiProject (where-ever that is) and ask them about re-doing the category structure. But please focus on getting the category struture in a better state for the readers. The category structure must not, on any account, be mangled to enable easier WikiProject tagging. That would be a disasterous reversal of priorities. If a category structure is poorly organised, or idiosyncratic, WikiProjects will have to manually produce a list of articles for bot tagging, or repair the category structure to make it easier for a reader to navigate. Carcharoth 15:17, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Try Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains. Carcharoth 15:19, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I wrote my message here after contacting the Wikipedia:WikiProject Trains/Categories task force without response yesterday. I admit I only waited one day, but I just felt like expanding my query. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 20:10, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
The categories task force has been pretty inactive. As a prominent contributor in TWP, I was also contacted directly about this issue. I haven't had a chance to formulate a response yet, but it is high on my list of action items. The biggest problem that we've seen with this automatic tagging is that it recurses through the subcategories tagging articles that aren't necessarily within CPChi's scope. I don't know how this bot's code is written, but I've written a few scripts that parse through subdirectories on my Linux box and I've been able to write them with exception lists to prevent parsing subdirectories that I don't want it to look through. There should be a similar method to note the exceptions here. Slambo (Speak) 10:41, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
BTW, SatyrBot (which is the bot working on this project) doesn't follow subcategories. Did that once - re-wrote the bot so it wouldn't happen again :) -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 02:15, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
A project about a single city seems very sily in my opinion. --Andersmusician $ 02:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Really? Even one with almost three million people? Seems significant enough to warrant a WikiProject to me... -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 02:12, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Why significant?, this would mean (4 example) that every capital city in SouthAm. would get its own project. --Andersmusician $ 03:01, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, it would. Why is this bad? -Amarkov moo! 03:25, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
then we return to the overtagging problem, by tagging it with WP:CHICAGO, WP:ILLINOIS, WP:USA... --Andersmusician $ 03:47, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
For the largest, say, 5 cities in America, I don't see a problem with that. Each of those cities has at least a tenth of the population of their state, so there's tons of wikipedians from each city that would be a part of either or both (city or state) wikiprojects. Now, Center Harbor, NH - that would be a silly WikiProject. As for the cities in South America, how many residents of S.A. countries are wikipedians on EN.wikipedia.org? Not nearly enough to start a WikiProject, which is why there are so few for South America. WikiProjects, unlike articles, are about editors as much as they are about the articles they support. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 04:30, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree with you on this. we're lost. --Andersmusician $ 20:33, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] OVER-TAGGING (again)

I really don't see any problem with overtagging artiles' talkpages with banners, since this brings more people from different projects to Improve these articles (that is what all us want). I consider that the real problem is the allowed creation of many worthless wikiprojects. You know --Andersmusician $ 02:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. -- Ned Scott 02:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
I disagree that overtagging is harmless (although I think tagging at all is generally harmful), but there is certainly a problem with the multiple Wikiprojects that are really too small to need existence. -Amarkov moo! 02:43, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
then why do you think overtagging is harmless?--Andersmusician $ 03:05, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't. Sorry, I would respond to what you're asking instead of being obtuse, but I'm not sure what you intended to ask. -Amarkov moo! 03:24, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
just to clear ideas among people who read this now. (see also above section comment)--Andersmusician $ 03:47, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia maintenence WikiProjects

I've noticed that the organization system for Wikipedia maintenence WikiProjects is even more disorganized than the one for regular projects. The category is underpopulated, the lengthy list of projects has no internal organizing structure, there is an great amount of overlap between projects, and in some cases there's no clear distinction between true WikiProjects and "Wikipedian organizations." I've made a proposal for organizing these projects, which can be found at: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Council/Directory#Proposal_for_organizing_Wikipedia_Maintenence_projects. Fishal 13:17, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] nEw proposal

this one is for reduce over-tagged articles by half at least. It's about forbidding to tag an article with for example a "A" wikiProject if it is already categorized by a "B" WikiProject if "A" is parent of "B". Please tell me whether you agree or not --Andersmusician $ 18:49, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that "forbidding" is much too strong a word, but I'm all for encouraging editors to avoid tagging talkpages simultaneously as belonging to both a parent and a child WProject. Using the above Chicago discussion as an example, I think that when a WikiProject Chicago person goes to tag the article and finds it already covered under WikiProject Illinois, they can go to the Illinois project talk page and say, "Pardon me, would you mind if we took over this page, as well as a number of other Chicago-related pages, from you guys? I realize that you have worked hard tagging and assessing various Chicago articles, but as a project devoted to Chicago rather than to Illinois in general, we can give it more focused attention and ease some of your burden." Then, the Illinois people might say, "Sure, take the lot," or they might say, "No, we worked damn hard assessing those articles." Or, more likely, they'll say, "Take some of the articles that arene't as relevant to our project (like World's Columbian Exposition), but let's jointly work on (and tag) the articles relevant not just to Chicago, but to the entire state (like Chicago and Illinois and Michigan Canal). If we make this discussion process a guideline, it will cut back on genuine overtagging without forcing projects to compete for articles. If certain articles do accumulate lots of tags, I think the tag-nesting template used at Talk:Chicago makes the problem less of an issue. Fishal 20:03, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
The problems with Anders' suggestion that I see are:
  • From what I've seen, the parent project tends to tag the article first, and the more specific one only tags it later.
  • Probably the best solution is to suggest that people use m:CatScan to figure out which articles belong to child projects, and then untag any that aren't of general interest (eg. Salvation should be tagged by both the Calvinism project, and the general Christianity project, IMO, although the "Christianity core topics work group" should hopefully help with this).
-- TimNelson 00:49, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
That's a pretty good way of wording it. Having the parent not tagging the general interest articles seems like something that wouldn't offend anyone if a banner was removed. This is kind of like what's done for WP:DIGI and WP:ANIME (although WP:DIGI is pretty much a task force, just not in title, of WP:ANIME). Main anime articles are tagged with both project banners, but more specific topics are only tagged with the child project. -- Ned Scott 02:48, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
What gets me is like with WikiProject Sci-fi comes in and starts tagging articles about individual movies or TV shows. It's not a child project of anyone, and I'm not really sure what kind of help such a project is over-all, let alone with tagging. -- Ned Scott 02:50, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tier approach?

Doesn't the tier approach outlined on this project page seem a bit bureaucratic and over-wieldy? Can't we just have two types of projects - active and inactive - and if a project stays inactive for a length of time (say a year), have it go through the MfD process? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 04:53, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I see your point, but I'm not sure about MfD for projects simply being inactive. (I'm starting to like the idea of a WikiProject review, which could also provide positive advice for growth). Some seem to be easily MFDable, but others it might just be that we need to label as inactive, and clean up left over banners or whatever. -- Ned Scott 05:00, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeh - I can see that combination. Do a review if a project is *mostly* inactive, with outside (the project) suggestions for making the project better - or even to "subsume" a project (as a task force?) into another one. And if it's still inactive after a while, the review could be to disband - with associated banner cleanup, etc. I like it. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 05:50, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
yeah, but also, for avoiding many deletion process in the future we should designate more requirements for wikiproject creation. (eg. to require signatures of at least a certain quantity of users for applying creation) --Andersmusician $ 03:43, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
IIRC, the point of the tiering process is to encourage more people to create Task forces, which implies a co-ordinated appropach to banners (ie. one banner with task forces, rather than 3 or 4 overlapping ones). It also helps avoid duplication, and helps people find projects that they want.
Allow me to make a point here; I would never have started my first WikiProject if I'd had to seek permission. That WikiProject seems to me to have been justinfied by acquiring around 20 members in its first two months; not stacks in the way of completed articles yet, but its been useful for co-ordination. You've suggested that the problem is that people are allowed to create projects that are not worthwhile. I don't think people should be prevented from starting projects (unless they're against WIkipedia policy; ie. WikiProject POV :) ). I do think, though, that they should be guided to create task forces rather than projects.
Allow me also to mention that the Christianity WikiProject has recently adopted the Jesus WikiProject as a task force (it's still nominally inactive, but we should probably change that).
In addition, there's a discussion at the World Music project about repurposing the project as a "Regional and National" music project, and having a separate "Roots and Folk" music project. So repurposing a project is probably quite possible too.
HTH, -- TimNelson 05:42, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
I agree about "seeking permission" - it's unwiki.
But the tiered approach seems like there has to be a "governing body" that reviews which projects are in which tier - at least that's the way it seems. I haven't waded through the whole description. Which is another point.
And a review process, which is something most editors are familiar with, would also be able to steer projects into task forces, or collaboration with other projects, repurposing, etc. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 13:33, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Has anyone defined what 'active' and 'inactive' mean? As long as these are defined much more objectively than subjectively, I would be OK with that. Further, just because a project is inactive doesn't mean it's dead -- it could instead mean that a project's most active members are generally burned out for a period of time, and will eventually return to re-energize the project. Also, apparent inactivity can happen while a project is spending most of its time working on initial assessments. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 00:51, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
The rule of thumb has been that if a project hasn't written anything on its talk page in two months, it's "inactive". Even if the members are working on initial assessments, etc., they're probably still discussing things on their talk page. So a time for review would be, IMHO, something like 4 months. If they haven't posted anything on their talk page in that long, most likely the project is dead. And a simple "Hey - anyone here?" should bring anyone out of the woodwork :) -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:51, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] {{WikiProjectBannerShell}}

I would encourage everyone to take a good look at this really useful new template for combining multiple projects on a talk page. It seems to be quickly gaining popularity and even supplanting the use of {{WikiProjectBanners}} to some degree. What's great about {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} is it shows the title of the various wikiprojects, and it even shows the assessment associated with each one. Thus, wikiprojects can inform article readers of their presence (i.e., advertise for new members), while not clogging up the talk page. Very nifty, IMHO. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 01:00, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

It seems like it requires |nested=. Well, the project templates are varied, so it isn't possible to completely use {{WikiProjectBannerShell}}. V60 干什么？ · 喝掉的酒 · ER 4 01:03, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Most project banners already have the code - over 250 of them do, anyway, with more being added every day. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:49, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, |nested= is required, but it's not absolutely so, as project templates which haven't been converted yet can be encapsulated within {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} using {{BannerShell}}. As far as I've seen so far, the only cases where this overall approach doesn't work is when a project template generates additional banners. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 01:51, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
New? -- Ned Scott 03:54, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Three months old is new to me, and I didn't discover them until the past week or two. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:20, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough. -- Ned Scott 04:28, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Standing lists at Wikiprojects

To facilitate throughput to GA and FA, I'm trialling this; I've listed Standing Lists of large articles with substantial content which may be within striking distance of GA with varying amounts of work WRT formatting and copyediting. Some are already being worked on but I'm seeing if this increases collaboration. So far I've done this on WP mammals talk page and WP Birds collab pages. Be interesting to see if more of these come through cheers, Cas Liber | talk | contribs 01:33, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Approach

As discussed above, I and a couple others feel this tiered approach might be over-bureaucratic and difficult to implement.

As a different approach, I've put together User:SatyrTN/WikiProject_reform. That proposal is to create a "WikiProject for Discussion" - a review process similar to the *fD process already in place. I'd appreciate any comments anyone has. If there's significant interest, I'd be interested in replacing the tiered approach with the review approach. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 15:52, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I'll comment here rather than there, to keep everyone in the loop.
The things I like about your proposal:
  • It's short
  • It makes a concrete proposal, rather than talking about possibilities
The things I don't like:
  • The proposals aren't specific enough
  • It's not complete enough -- I still like the tiering system
My problem with it is, first you agree on a merge, and then you tell the projects to sort it out. I think a better system would be to specify the type of merge in the proposal. This would essentially be equivalent to the "re-tiering" described in the other document, except that we wouldn't call it that. So I'm suggesting that you could propose two different types of merge, and a re-purpose. So if you propose a merge, it basically means that the two projects are stuck together to become one. If you propose a "re-tier" (feel free to come up with a better name), then you're proposing a task-force-isation of one project. If you propose a "repurpose", then you're essentially proposing a rename and a change of goals/scope.
I've already done both a retiering proposal (Jesus Wikiproject) and a repurposing, and I can assure you they're both useful. It also prevents people from agreeing to a merge and then becoming acrimonious as to how it's to be done -- they already know what the deal is before any voting takes place.
I think the real problem here is that we have no information as to how tiers are assigned. If it was the case that every project picked the tier they thought appropriate, and it was just used for identification purposes (ie. so that people know what to expect), then I think that would be useful. If we make people jump through lots of hoops to get into certain tiers, then that's a problem. So I guess my proposal is, keep the tiering idea, but go easy on the bureaucracy (which admittedly isn't what I've necessarily been doing above).
Ok, let me revise my proposal:
  1. First, we focus on the tagging reform and merge/split/delete process, a la Satyr's proposal, get that working, and an accepted set of policy/guidelines/processes surrounding that
  2. Then we get a tiering system working as an informational tool -- think of it as being a standard infobox for WikiProjects, telling you what you can expect of the project. We make it semi-optional -- basically, you're not required to have the infobox, but you should have one (ie. don't remove them if someone else sets one up). The inactive status could also be marked in this box
  3. Finally, we set up an optional WikiProject review system (see the "accreditation" section of this page)
How do those three points sound to everyone?
-- TimNelson 07:05, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I've just realised -- if the Tiering system is purely informational (as I suggested above), then we don't need to go through any kind of official policy/guideline stuff (although we do need a bit of consensus). My plan is, if no-one objects, to make a WikiProject infobox, and document the tiering idea in the guide. Then that can be removed from this WikiProject reform proposal, and the policy documentation can continue apace, as there will be one less item for controversy.
--TimNelson 03:51, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
I like what you're saying, Tim. I could also see documenting the "tier" of a project in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. And I like the idea of an infobox that lets potential project members know a) how active the project is and b) "what to expect".
I wonder about the "accreditation system" - couldn't that be a part of the "WPfD" process? It seems very similar to me - review the project regarding scope, activities, and relationship to other wikiprojects and "assign" to a tier. That also underscores that the WPfD process isn't just for when there's a problem (inactivity, overtagging, whatever). It's also for review of how the project's working and potentially suggesting courses of action. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 04:15, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
I've discovered that a WikiProject infobox already exists: Template:Infobox WikiProject. I'll expand on this a little so that it does what we want as far as tiering specification goes. However, I thought that it'd be better to get more specific than a generalised "tier". So my thought is that we can rate it according to the following:
  • inactive (default = no) -- If true, includes Template:inactive (which includes the appropriate category)
  • helps-organise-children (default = no) true if the project has "task forces"
  • has-other-goals (default = yes) should be false for the old "Tier 0" projects
  • assessment (default = null) -- links to assessment page
-- TimNelson 05:20, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
What's "has other goals"? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 13:51, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] moved comment from project page

Wikpedia:Miscellany for deletion already serves this function adequately. We do not need an XfD process for every conceivable typo of Wikipedia file. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:34, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
Because no one's using MfD for this purpose. It could indeed be rolled in to the MfD process, but since this page is discussing WikiProject reform, it would be good to spell it out. Also, any suggestions for a project would be specific to WikiProjects, which MfD may not have dealt with yet. And finally, deletion wouldn't be the only option available. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:50, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Tim, Satyr, et al.: I like where this is going. I think a less rigid tier system could go a very long way toward relieving the second identified problem with WikiProjects: the "redundancy and fracturing." A more organized directory of WProjects will make it much easier for participants to look at what other projects are doing, and then avoid some of the duplication that's happening. And Tim, we briefly discussed reorganizing the maintenence projects; I think that this system could be applied to them as well. They suffer from even more redundancy than the regular projects (often, even redundancy with projects that operate outside the WikiProject structure, see WP:MAINT). Fishal 15:10, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reform Reform

So I guess the next step here would be to separate out the tier system into it's own guideline, then clean up the WPfD system and add in the process. Does that sound about right? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 13:52, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

But that's the whole point -- we don't need a guideline, we're just talking about a definition of terms here. So if we note in Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide which tier is synonymous with what, and what would normally be expected of each tier, then we don't *need* an official guideline. -- TimNelson 01:37, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
So let me restate, then: the next step here would be to separate out the tier system, then clean up the WPfD system and add in the process. Kewl? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 01:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
Right. But I wanted to retain that little bit about the tagging, so I did the removal myself. Note that by removing this, I'm not proposing that the entire tiering system is irrelevant, but just that we need to be focussed to get this stuff promoted from "people randomly arguing" to being a guideline. So lets get the WPfD system working argued about, and we can worry about formal tiering processes later. -- TimNelson 03:19, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally, you'll notice that I've made task-force-isation a separate concept from merging. This is to prevent people all voting for something, but not agreeing on what they're actually voting for. -- TimNelson 07:04, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possible alternate way of differentiating projects

Maybe another way of "defining" projects would be according to how they fulfill the three basic functions of wikipedia:creating, developing, and maintaining articles. Smaller projects, like Wikipedia:WikiProject Crowded House, for instance, probably are initially created to create and develop content related to their subject. However, many such projects which deal with subjects which are inherently temporary, like TV shows, bands, specific video games, individual book series, etc., will almost certainly fairly quickly come to the point where they have basically created all the articles desired, and have developed them to at least a reasonable level. At that point, they will tend to become inactive. Then, it is reasonable for the larger projects to step in to maintain such articles. Such larger projects could be the basic "subject" projects, like Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography, Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine, Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history, specific national WikiProjects, and the like. These projects could request to as it were take over the management of the content of the smaller projects when they basically create all that they have wanted to. Anyway, just an idea. John Carter 13:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] My experiences

I have re-organized WP:PHILO around task forces. I think this form of organization is better for a more united Philosophy project. The banner includes fields. Any particular article may be in one or more fields.

I have also had success using transclusions as a way to have separate areas become united on one page and still keep their individual identity. The participants roster is a collection of transclusions from each task force. In the case of the Logic task force, transclusions have made it possible for the territorial WP:MATH people to keep their mathematical logic separate from the "philosophical" logic. The requested articles is another example under logic. The Philosophy noticeboard is another.

Perhaps WikiProject Reform can some make recommendations on standardized ways to set up a multi-task force, and interdisciplinary projects using these methods. Greg Bard 02:54, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Greg, I took a look at the project but couldn't figure this out, I'm desperately trying to understand how you are using transclusions. What happens if someone just adds their name to the main page participants list as instructed?--Doug.(talk • contribs) 00:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Each transcluded file contains the header for a subsection (three equal signs). When the transcluded part comes up it will include an "edit" link for that section... That is, if your preferences allow it (I hadn't thought of that.) Perhaps I need to make a small edit link for those who don't have that option set.
Otherwise you will have to type the name into the addressbar manually. In all cases the file is the base name of the task force plus: "/participants"
If someone adds a name above or below the transclusion link, it can be moved to that file pretty easily. Perhaps there is a better way to deal with it? I think making the link clear will suffice. Greg Bard 02:17, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
I think I have solved the problem. If you look at how the aesthetics task force roster shows up on the task force page, and the same one appears on the philosophy WikiProject participants page
Greg Bard 05:06, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WPfD: Banners are the most pressing issue, not Projects

Over-tagging has become rampant, and unfortunately few Projects have taken the lead of MILHIST, Biography, etc, and opted for a shared tag with parameters for child projects and workgroups.

In my opinion, in most cases it's not WikiProjects which need to be merged or deleted, it's talk page banners. {{WPBiography}} should be the model here, as we managed to integrate several independent WikiProjects into "workgroups" (British Royalty, Musicians) and have them share our template.

Of course, there are sometimes WikiProjects which need to be deleted (they've never done anything, they're against policy, etc) but MfD already handles these adequately. Furthermore, in the case of inactive projects, they should be archived.

Having a process whereby people are encouraged to nominate WikiProjects for deletion will lead to bad feeling and is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is also ignorant of the fact that the main problem - template clutter - can be solved by forcing groups to become child projects and to share banners.

That said, there is also a growing problem with vanity Projects and talking shops; WikiProjects which have never actually done anything other than tag talk pages.

So, perhaps we would need the WPfD process to have options like this, with very clear guidelines so as to minimise bad feeling and the risk of editors feeling their Project is being bullied:

  • "Become a child project of..." (called "Re-tiering" (or "task-force-isation") overleaf; nicer terms) - this should only apply where a project is clearly in the territory of a bigger, active project (England is part of UK; Musicians articles are biographies. The Beatles stands alones because it covers albums, songs, biographies and other things). The primary goal here is to get banner sharing
  • Merger, only where a project has achieved little or nothing and is within the scope of a larger, active project (e.g. a non-performing WikiProject The Falklands War could be forceably mergedinto MilHist; in effect this would mean permanently archiving the project, directing visitors to Milhist, and deleting any banner).
  • Deletion, only where MfD would delete the project (it violates policy, has no useful edit history, etc).

This would of course mean that many smaller, active projects who do not mostly overlap a large parent would be left alone. Rightly so, imho. Targetted instead would be the silly layers of projects who don't share banners (WP UK, WP England, WP UK Geography etc etc); projects who do naff all; and those we already delete at MfD. --kingboyk (talk) 11:28, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

"Re-purposing": changing the name, goals, and/or scope of a WikiProject; an example would be the proposal to change the World music WikiProject into a Regional and National music WikiProject - Totally impractical if the participants don't agree.

"Re-tiering" (or "task-force-isation"): an example would be the Jesus WikiProject becoming the Jesus taskforce of the Christianity WikiProject - As above, this can be forced and would achieve a lot.

If the consensus is to split the WikiProject into multiple projects, then the pages would be cloned to the new name(s)

Technically, different criteria would be used - for example, guidelines for when a Wikiproject should be split would be based on the number of tagged articles rather than the size of the project page. - Ghastly idea. Cloning WikiProjects?! Without the agreement of the participants? Based on number of articles? --kingboyk (talk) 11:35, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

The Jesus project is a task force of Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity. John Carter (talk) 19:52, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Let's start with Category:WikiProject United Kingdom

This category probably doesn't contain all the British WikiProjects, but it certainly contains most of them. Of these, most are geographical - England (state), Somerset (county), WPUKGeo (general geo), London (city), waterways, etc. Indeed all but one or two, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Trams, not only are UK topics but don't have any other likely parents. There's 25 or more projects right there (after deducting 1 or 2 possible exceptions) which could share one template with parameters. Just look at Talk:London - it has England, London, Cities, UKGeo, inside a banner container. That could easily be reduced down to one banner! (e.g. {{WikiProject UK|england=yes|london=yes|city=yes|class=whatever}} (city=yes would automatically set geo=yes).

These groups aren't going to introduce template sharing voluntarily. They all have vanity, they all love their templates. Some of these groups love their templates more than the articles they're attached to.

We have to:

  1. Use a sledgehammer - add these parameters to {{WikiProject UK}}, redirect the old ones to it, and get cleaning up talk pages (if resistance is low, bots can then be sent out to replace the excess templates with parameters and remove any no-longer-needed banner containers), or
  2. Get some consensus behind some sort of more formal process as discussed above and on attached page, or
  3. Accept that the lunatics have control of the asylum and just forget all about it. (But, be warned, people are surely likely to start asking whether these banners serve any purpose at all, and even the good ones could be in danger).

Up to you. --kingboyk (talk) 19:49, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Looks like a sound idea to me. The same thing could possibly/probably be done with Wikipedia:WikiProject United States, particularly regarding locations which have changed states over time. And the "sledgehammer" has been used before, by WikiProject Canada among others. It might be a good idea to establish some sort of guidelines for when such could take place, though. John Carter (talk) 19:53, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
{{WP India}} is a really excellent example of this concept in practice. --kingboyk (talk) 16:15, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] One other thing about national and regional WikiProjects

I know I'm not alone in this. I really dislike national and regional WikiProjects tagging articles about people merely because the person lived or was born in that country or region. They never get edited by the WikiProject, they just boost numbers.

I would, then, further propose that if national and regional WPs migrate to one banner per country, that at the same time the articles about people within their scope get moved to a WPBiography workgroup e.g. "UK biographical articles" (a joint workgroup between projects in effect, but with the code in {{WPBiography}}). This wouldn't increase clutter as {{WPBiography}} belongs on all bio talk pages anyway. --kingboyk (talk) 17:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Good idea, although I, who might be responsible for a lot of such, particularly recently regarding Mexico and the Polynesian areas, think what you're probably dealing with is more categorization as "People from X" than because they were specifically born or lived there, and the categorization could maybe be changed as well. Also, such tagging is one of the few ways that most of the related portals can determine which biographies are worth including. I think the reason in many cases is the hope that editors from the area might be able to at least find photos that an outsider might not. I have proposed a variety of Biography task forces before, specific for profession or field of activity, and certainly national groups would work as well. My only question would be that, ultimately, it might entail a very large number of national subprojects, maybe even a few hundred, and that might complicate the banner a lot. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
One per country? So every city, town, village, mountain, river (etc) would fall under one "United States" banner? Or would the US use particular state projects/banners? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, it might be possible to have a US rivers joint task force with WikiProject Rivers, a mountains task force with WP Mountains, etc. Those might be good ideas, if we can get the banner wizards to get together to work on them. And I just became an admin on the basis of saying I wanted to work on banners. Do I know exactly the wrong time to make such statements or not? Regarding the US, Canada, and some of the other huge countries, there might be need for further specification in some instances, but I think in general the idea is probably a good one. John Carter (talk) 18:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
One question which will come to mind to a lot of editors is, if such banners are to be created, how small the constituent units of the banner should be. This is important, as those constituent units should probably be based on the same territory as the extant WikiProject or subproject related to the area. I've started an extremely complicated template at User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers, which might serve as a partial basis for such future templates, and found that difficulty is a very real one. One of the problems is that, in effect, development of such banners might help to inhibit the creation of even smaller work groups in the future, for good or ill. I've foregone inclusion of the various subprojects relevant to the counties of England, for instance. Certainly, categorization could also be a real problem with developing such a system, which should probably also relate at some point to the formal proposal here as well. Anyway, I've still got a lot to do with the sample template, and am off back to it. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
One per country, yes, but individual states and cities could have workgroup parameters. I'm not suggesting these groups be told "you're not wanted any more" just "please share an upstream template". --kingboyk (talk) 17:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Additional concerns

I believe that there are several articles which inherently relate to a number of related subjects which are unlikely ever to have a "general" WikiProject developed for them. As a result, these separate projects have, to a degree, no choice to adding their separate banners to certain articles of importance to all of them, increasing banner clutter. I'm thinking in particular of topics which might be relevant to all the Abrahamic religions or Vedic religions. I think that these problems could be addressed if there were any way to create a banner which might indicate that those selected articles which are inherently within the scope of these disparate projects could have a specific banner made up for these common interest articles, saying, for instance, "This article related to the development of Abrahamic Religion is within the scope of WikiProject Christianity, WikiProject Islam, and WikiProject Judaism" (opting for alphabetical order here, although Judaism-Christianity-Islam - time order, of Judaism-Islam-Christianity might be possible as well)", with the banner endowed with the option of granting separate assessments for all the relevant main projects. In the instance above, maybe adding WikiProject Bible in some instances might make sense as well. Personally, I think that many/most of the projects in these situations would probably agree to using such a banner on those articles of common interest to all of them. Is there any precedent for the use of such a banner, though? John Carter (talk) 16:25, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Banner parameter question

Is there any way to add a separate parameter to the Biography banner which would not only select for professional subprojects, but maybe also for national subprojects, or, in the English-speaking countries, primary national subdivisions? The end result might be supported by the Swiss science and academia work group, for instance. John Carter (talk) 18:30, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

My template coding is rusty - Kirill would be a better person to answer this - but yes I don't see why not.
Pseudocode: if swiss=yes and science=yes then category:swiss science and academia work group etc
The template already has some code like this iirc. --kingboyk (talk) 17:50, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Single Banner?

I think, given the amount of content a given banner can potentially include, it might be possible, particularly if switches were employed well, for all projects to use the same single banner. That banner could include quick switches listing all the relevant projects designed to show name and selected graphic, so that it might look say, for example, "This article has been rated (X)-Class and "Y"-importance and is supported by the following WikiProjects: (List)." The specific projects listed could be chosen based primarily on whether the article is included in what might be called a "dedicated" category, that is, a category in which all of the contents are expected to within the scope of a given project.

I think there would be several advantages to this sort of system, including making assessmemt in general much easier. There already is one bot which will automatically place a banner on any article contained in one or more specified categories. That kind of bot could be used on all new articles, making it much easier to keep up with new content. If it could also either internally or externally store a copy of the contents of the category the last time it visited, it could even add or remove a given project's banner from an older article as required upon viewing that category again. For those articles which at this point don't fall within one or more such dedicated categories, a "temporary" tag could be added to the article until the categorization is fixed, but probably won't be necessary that often.

As most of us know, we are intending to have a bot ready soon which will be able to somewhat objectively determine the importance of an article. I am aware that are and will continue to be differences among projects regarding quality and importance assessments, and don't think that will change. However, I think those could be resolved by having a project which disagrees with an existing assessment by adding a + or - indicator after their coded name to indicate whether they few a given article as being of higher or lower importance or quality than the so-called "standard" assessment. I would think permitting an article's grade to be changed a maximum of two grades by a given project would be all that should ever be required. I confess to not knowing how hard or easy that might be, however.

There would still be one problem with this, which I admit to also being a problem with the User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers potential project banner I created. That big problem, which would have to be addressed, would be how to get a single banner to be able to automatically feed into categories which do not all follow the same naming pattern. Actually, that problem might be big enough to ensure that this proposal never takes off. Unfortunately, that same problem also very much stands in the way of the banner I proposed above ever being completely functional.

If this proposal above isn't acceptable, there is one other which occurs to me, which has at least one of the same problems as the one proposed above. That would be the creation of multi-function banners similar to that above. Those projects which have somewhat unique, clear guidelines regarding article content or style could be the ones listed at the top, with the various "supporting" projects listed below. Something of that kind would draw editors' attention to the guidelines better than they often do today. I would think projects which would have banners in such cases would include WikiProject Rivers, whose banner would list in the drop-down the projects for the area in which it can be found, and if possible categorize the article for all such projects. Other similar projects might include Biography, Mountains, Volcanoes, Lakes, Geography, Architecture, and so on.

I posted notes about this proposal on several individual editors' talk pages and on the WikiProject Council's talk page, hoping to get some responses one way or another about these ideas. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it would require a huge amount of code and the template would be a mess. It would be used on so many talk pages that every time it was edited the server would grind to a halt. I prefer the idea of having a few top level templates (bio, UK, USA, etc) and templates for all multi-disciplinary WikiProjects. Sorry I don't have time to answer more fully or think about this further at the moment as I'm working on/testing my bot... yep, putting more banners onto pages :) --kingboyk (talk) 18:10, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Probably right, so that idea can probably be scratched, although the individual projects themselves might be able to be added to a "switch" page and thus not affect the banner itself at all. I hadn't thought of that, actually, silly me. That leaves open the option of trying to create banners like the proposed Rivers banner, which have the problem of differentially named categories. Can anyone think of a way to maybe make a banner be able to fill categories based on different naming styles? If that could be accomplished, the banners for Rivers, Mountains, Lakes, Volcanoes, Cities, Architecture, possibly Biography and Military history, and a few other "main" banners might be all that would be required in most cases, which would also significantly reduce the amount of banner clutter. John Carter (talk) 18:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
It would be possible, but it would be bigger than those limits that Kirill Lokshin talked about, and it would be at least 20 times larger than that Africa template. It wouldn't be hard to make a bot to recognise what category the article is in though, but that might lead to mistakes. We could possibly have a banner for each of the core topics that have major portals and have all the projects from that discipline share a banner — Arts, Biography, Geography, History, Mathematics, Science, Society and Technology (eg. The Geography banner would be shared by WP:USA, WP:UK, WP:AFRICA, WP:USRD etc.)--Phoenix-wiki 18:32, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I agree: it actually sounds like a marvellous idea to me to match the core banners with the subpages of the new WikiProject directory. This would highly improve the general classification of WikiProjects, and create a harmony between the banner system and the directory which might have several benefits.
As a sidenote, I am quite in the dark as far as the "standard assessment of article importance" is concerned; actually, this is the first time I have ever heard of it. Where can I learn more about it? Waltham, The Duke of 20:37, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
In all honesty, I don't really understand what the objective behind all this banner-shuffling is here. Consolidated banners have never been an end unto themselves, in my view; rather, they're one aspect to the broader question of consolidated projects.
And without project-level consolidation, banner consolidation will create more redundancy, not less. The only reasonable way for a project to abandon its own banner in favor of a consolidated one is if the consolidated one explicitly supports all the infrastructure used by that project. The typical way to accomplish this would be through turning the project into a task force—ensuring that it has no infrastructure beyond that of the parent project—but other methods are possible. In any case, however, trying to merge banners without accounting for the underlying infrastructure gains us nothing.
What is the purpose of the draft Rivers banner, for example? It certainly doesn't support all the infrastructure of every national and regional project, so it cannot replace their banners. But what, then, is the sense in adding the national tags to it; the only result will be to change from articles tagged with a Rivers banner and a US banner to articles tagged with a Rivers+US banner and a US banner. (This aside from the fact that a naive intersection will produce extraneous subsets; I rather doubt "Libyan rivers" will be a topic that attracts any editor interest, for example.)
I think that some people are unfortunately losing sight of how things actually work here. Banner consolidation is not a way to revive dead projects, nor a fundamental goal of the WikiProject system as a whole; treating it as such is counterproductive, at best. Kirill 20:57, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
I think that banner consolidation is a good thing, but there are schemes to do this already via nesting inside a single template (to reduce template creep), or via WikiProject consolidation where appropriate (as Kirill mentions). I don't think a banner like this Rivers one would work well, because there are an immense no. of intersections possible and it's impossible to code for them all. However, if there is some way to reduce the proliferation of categories by consolidating them under the ten top-level subject areas, that would be very nice - but I don't know that such a thing is possible.
Regarding importance, we do now have test output from a bot, so we can expect some major changes in the coming weeks - if you want to help with this please let me know. Part of that process may be to formalise the WikiProject importance definitions somewhat, though they will always be project-dependent. Walkerma (talk) 04:36, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The scramble for articles

I'm a editor with WP:BIRD and I've been noticing an increasing trend over the last year or so for editors on the various regional (country, continent, etc) to tag our bird species (and genera and even families) articles with regional tags on the basis that the wretched creature (or taxa) in question is found with its borders. Or, in some cases, has been seen in that country on one or more occasions (what are known in the business as vagrants). While this seems pretty acceptable if the species is a well known and emblematic one, such as the New Zealand Kiwi or the Japanese Crane, in some cases unfortunate and rather unknown species have been lumbered with five country tags or more. In theory species such as the House Sparrow, Barn Owl, Peregrine Falcon and Ruddy Turnstone could end up with hundreds of tags if this trend continues. Unless the species is a country endemic (like the Golden Dove of Fiji) or emblematic (like the Bald Eagle, which actually hasn't even been adopted by the US Wikiproject!) is there any justification for this over-abundance of tags? Why not claim rock, tree, road and sand as well, since they are found in countries too? What can I do if articles get over-tagged? In the case of Little Cormorant I threw all the country tags into one of those shells, leaving out the WP:BIRD one since we actually do most of the maintenance for the article? Is that acceptable? I've also deleted tags when the species in question doesn't actually occur in the country involved; could I prune some of these tags as well? Sabine's Sunbird talk 03:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like you have the right idea. Personally, I'd just remove the tags that aren't really related, but in any case, giving BIRD more presence is appropriate. -- Ned Scott 05:09, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Create A wikiproject

An article type, that is, Ancient History of Western and Northern Europe, Italy, Greece, North Africa and the Mid-East, is not a featured Project on wikiprojects. As these hitory pages are representative of a time period that is of most interest to the community, it doesn't seem as though these histories are co-ordinated, which is why i propose to create a new wikiproject, entitled Ancient History of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. This should provide an illuminating disscusion, and also it will better organise a set of subjects that provide the greatest degree of insite into where we are coming from, and to also where we are going. If anyone is interested, please contact my talk page. --Tom.mevlie (talk) 12:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree that there is a need to co-ordinate these histories, as they are more or less interconnected, but I don't think that a new WikiProject would be the best way to deal with this. Perhaps a Task Force would be more helpful, under the guidance of the relevant WikiProjects. In any case, the WikiProject Council is the best place to discuss such matters. (By the way, an alternative idea for the title could be "Ancient History of the MTW map area"; much shorter, wouldn't you agree? ;-)). Waltham, The Duke of 21:25, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
The comparatively nascent Wikipedia:WikiProject History would probably be the extant group whose scope would include such articles, as it is about the only one whose scope is large enough. Part of the problem is going about and tagging all the relevant articles for all the various projects. With only about 50% of all articles tagged at all so far, that can be and is a real problem. But I do think that there probably are enough projects regarding the general subject of history already that there probably isn't a specific need for the creation of a new one. John Carter (talk) 17:06, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject template - needimage syntax

I have looked in a number of pages but have not been able to find any guidelines on template syntax on the topic of requesting images. There are a number WikiProject templates that have some form of needimage=yes field and create entries in categories. However there is some variation in naming convention of the template tag and the name of the resulting category. Is there a standard example anywhere? Traveler100 (talk) 08:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)