Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 25

WP:WikiProject Council/Guide is not a guideline

Hello. I am removing the "guideline" tag from the WikiProject guide. The promotion to guideline seems to have gone entirely without discussion, and it has consistently been changed and rewritten with little to no discussion. As such, it is completely inappropriate that it is tagged as a guideline; per WP:policies and guidelines, a guideline must be supported by consensus. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 18:50, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

I generally agree it shouldn’t be a guideline (maybe for other reasons than you provided) but I think it’s more of an information page than an essay. -- Calidum 19:13, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

As Calidum pointed out, it's informational. @PJvanMill: would you consider switching the template from "essay" to "information page"? Various templates used on this page will need to be changed, as will the sentence that has "guidelines" in it near the beginning. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:29, 20 September 2020 (UTC) Struck, replaced with recommendation to change back to guideline AND discuss possible demotion to "information page" - see below. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:39, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

@Calidum @davidwr I have no objection to changing the template to {{information page}}, I agree "essay" is not quite the right word. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 19:33, 20 September 2020 (UTC)  Done 19:37, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Comment Things were a lot looser in 2006. The apparent absence of "push-back" suggest at least assent if not outright consent. Unless there was a move to revert it since that was "squashed" without sufficient discussion, I recommend changing it back to "Guideline" then holding a "re-affirmation" RFC if you think one is needed. Your point about this changing over time without enough discussion is a good one, which is why I'm suggesting a "re-affirm status as Guideline or demote to information page" with "no consensus" being "no consensus to demote." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:39, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

@davidwr I would say an outcome of "no consensus" should be interpreted as "no consensus that this should be a guideline / no consensus to uphold guideline status". I think this should not be marked as guideline before a strong consensus FOR it is demonstrated. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 19:43, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

@PJvanMill: Hmm. I went back and read Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 1#Tag for guide pages and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 2#Guide header wording and it looks like you are right, there was actually a discussion that resulted in it NOT being called a guideline. On the other hand, within months of those 2006 discussions, someone boldly changed it to a guideline. Unless I missed something, it went over 13 years without being reverted or objected to, which strongly suggests "silent assent." In any case, it's obvious it's time for some kind of formal discussion. Unfortunately, it looks like Radiant! who made the late-2006 change has retired, or at least he's no longer editing under that name. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:31, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

@davidwr Not that Radiant! would probably remember an action taken in 2006... :) I think the right place to start that discussion would be here, with a mention at WP:VPPRO, correct? Despite the fact that this has undeniably been the status quo for a very long time, I still believe that it should not be returned to guideline status unless/until that discussion results in "Support". In today's Wikipedia, we should use today's WP:PG policy and not just take remnants from the 2006 wild west for granted. And yes, there has been a long time of silence, but I would suggest it was a silence of indifference (wikiprojects aren't that big a deal, after all) and not of approval. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:11, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to the council page. We have a process in place if there is a problem and people feel it's not classed right.-WP:HISTORICAL. Last thing we want is editors changing things without going through the whole process to get all associated pages up to date. Side note would be OK with it tagged as an info page. But best get input for the community and council members first.-Moxy 🍁 21:04, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

(ec) Moxy, I see you just undid my change. In your edit summary, you indicate that you are reverting solely because my edit was out of process. Now, sure, whether a page is tagged as guideline is important business. My point is, though, that tagging this as guideline was done completely out of process as well. I think that given the WP:PG policy, we should default to not tagging something as a guideline unless there is clear consensus for it. I won't edit war, but please consider my position. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:20, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Note that WP:HISTORICAL says An accepted policy or guideline... (emphasis mine). Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:22, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Was no process in place when this was originally promoted. So yes a talk would be needed as the page has influence countless conversation and has been stable without a problem in its status for over a decade. That said even if promoted out of process....we have a process for that now.....but that would not hold up to scrutiny because of the length of time that has passed....again at WP:HISTORICAL. Can I ask what the problem is here that it needs demotion? We have many guidelines that are in this format....as in information rather then rules...this is a mix of both.--Moxy 🍁 21:33, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy My main issue is that marking it as a guideline suggests all advice in it is mandatory. The page currently suggest that it is a rule that before creating a project, it must first be proposed at WP:WikiProject Council/Proposals and may only be created when there are six supporters. In reality, that is not treated as a rule but simply as advice - see for example here. That, in particular, I do not think should be a rule, which is the main reason I would vote-non-vote "Oppose" on an RfC asking whether this should be a guideline.

That said, the content in the "General principles" section seems to describe accepted norms that are actually being followed - something one would expect from a guideline. So it feels like part of this should be a guideline, but part should be marked as "just advice". Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 14:21, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

A guideline = " generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply". If you believe a project will be viable with just a few people I would suggest go a head. --Moxy 🍁 14:57, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy Of course, but I have a problem with calling it a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow when in reality it's just advice, and I am also concerned with the fact that any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus seems to be consistently ignored. Both of those indicate to me that at least this part should not be marked as "guideline". I do not feel like the page is really preventing me from doing anything, it's just that the label feels inaccurate. It is not treated like a guideline, so why does it say "guideline"? I admit that this isn't really a big deal, but it feels like whether a page is marked as guideline or not should be a big deal. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 16:36, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Its a highly active page with countless discussions over its content and refenced thousands of times in talk that link here. Out of all the guidelines out there I would have to say this one is watched over by many. --Moxy 🍁 19:03, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy It was my impression that it has often been changed quite a lot with little discussion, but I might not have looked well enough. The more important point, though, is that the part of the guideline about creating a new wikiproject is regarded as optional advice and not really as a guideline. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 20:10, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Wow, it's not every day we consider reverting an edit from 14 years ago; nice find, PJvanMill! I have to agree, though, that whatever problems there may have been with the promotion in 2006, the fact that the guideline designation has stuck around for this long gives it status quo status, and an affirmative consensus will have to be formed to remove the designation. But that's alright, since as Moxy pointed out, we have a process for that, and I'd encourage it to be started, since I think a removal is a plausible outcome to expect. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:31, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, just to make sure: the right process for this is a request for comment on this talk page, advertised at WP:VPPRO? Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 20:10, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

PJvanMill, it's presumably whatever WP:HISTORICAL says. I'm not familiar with the process, so I'll defer to others for clarification. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:14, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

1. Start an WP:RFC on this page...see Example RfC here....that is short and non-opinionated...could have a section for rationale for change, survey and discussion sections.
2. Add {{Under discussion}} to the top of the guide with a link to the RfC just made.
3. Post a very short notice at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) again with a link to the RfC just made....notice could contain the RfC wording that again is short and to the point.
4. Sit back.....as the process may take over a month to conclude

--Moxy 🍁 03:55, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Moxy. PJvanMill)talk( 11:34, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

PJvanMill, it happens that I wrote most of the WP:PROPOSAL section that you are trying to impose on that page. This was many years after that page was declared to be a guideline, and well before you created your account last year, so of course I don't expect you to know anything about that. PROPOSAL is not intended to be applied retroactively. Instead, you should assume that any long-tagged page came by its tags in accordance with whatever the accepted process was at that time. As Sdkb notes, WP:HISTORICAL is the process for demoting pages that no longer need to hold their current status. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I understand. After posting that last comment, though, I changed my mind about trying to deprecate the whole guideline, given that I really only have a problem with the wording of one phrase as added in 2019. So I think I should just propose a change to that one bit of wording instead of starting a deprecation RfC on the whole thing. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 18:41, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

PJvanMill, maybe you should just Wikipedia:Be bold and improve it.

To give you a quick background on the process of creating WikiProjects, I've been thinking (for years) about canning the whole process, and telling people that, seriously, they just shouldn't create any more, and if they absolutely think that they need yet another, then they need to get several of their best wiki-friends to come to this page and try to talk us into it. It would be more realistic. Build it and they will come is not how WikiProjects work.

I ran some numbers back about 10 years ago (that's the source of statements about having at least six active editors). Attempts to start a group reliably fail unless there are multiple active editors involved in it. So if you want a chance at success, you need multiple editors who want to participate in the group (otherwise, you don't have a Wikipedia:WikiProject at all), those editors need to have made hundreds or thousands of edits, and you can't be new (because most new editors stop editing after a few months). If your group doesn't meet all of those criteria, you're just wasting your time setting up pages. Six active would-be participants is good. A dozen is safer. Three isn't enough.

What I'd like people to understand is that the proposal process does not recruit editors. Either you find them and bring them to the proposal, or nobody will show up. I'd also like them to understand that the advice about getting together a group is not an arbitrary rule. It's not even "a rule"; technically, the whole proposal process is optional. It's just a statement of the facts: to have a chance at your proposed WikiProject still having anyone around this time next year, you need to start with at least six editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

All so true. I'd like to see a wider approval process, say an Rfc, before any new project is allowed. Even the biggest struggle to stay active these days. Johnbod (talk) 21:43, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Surely, whether a project will succeed or fail cannot be predicted based just on the starting number of participants? After all, if you have a sound concept, and you have 4 people who are not only active but also actively recruiting, that number can grow to 6 relatively quickly - at least, if they have an actual, living wikiproject to recruit people to instead of some proposal. It just seems to me that for a group of 5 or 4 enthousiastic people, it is terrible advice to tell them to sit around until they are with 6. I will admit there is very little hope for this, though. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 23:54, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

It's a strong statistical probability, not an absolute rule. I could probably start a WikiProject single-handedly and turn it into something viable for a time, just because enough highly active editors know me and would put a page on their watchlists as a favor to me. But when we're talking about a real project, instead of a deliberate attempt to provide a counterexample, six was more likely to be successful than four. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Many English Wikipedia initiatives start with a rush of users stating their interest that rapidly fade away. A lot of interested participants is not a guarantee, nor is a hard numerical cutoff, but the more people involved, the greater the chance that some of them will stick around. The choice is not solely between doing nothing and starting a new WikiProject: editors interested in a subject who want to co-ordinate and discuss points of interest should definitely find an appropriate venue, particularly one where more interested participants can be found. Generally this will mean using the discussion page for an appropriate WikiProject that has some existing degree of activity. isaacl (talk) 22:49, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Comments subpages

I had a headache figuring out why all the WikiProject pages mention the Comments subpages. I eventually found WP:DCS and then MSGJ mentioning them here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 22#Comments subpages. Now that the headache is gone I am just annoyed by all those mentionings. Will they go away? Mysteriumen•♪Ⓜ ^•♪talk _{♪• look} 01:11, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

@Mysteriumen, where are they being mentioned? For example, on talk pages, in search results, in guidelines? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:39, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

I kept finding the /Comments mentioned, I think it was on talk pages as well, but here is one example Wikipedia:WikiProject Lebanon/Assessment#Assessment instructionsMysteriumen•♪Ⓜ ^•♪talk _{♪• look} 22:13, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@Mysteriumen: Many of the project pages tend to be relatively lightly edited. I have usually removed them as I've come across them. -- Dolotta (talk) 14:57, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Confusing links at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Wikipedia#Maintenance

Hello everybody. I noticed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Wikipedia in the Maintenance list are a bunch of Yes entries linking to No, a disambiguation page. In the source code they appear as unlinked no but in the resulting page they appear a Yes. As a result it is unclear whether yes or no is the intended mesage. Can you help figuring out what happens in the background and fix this confusing mess? Thank you. Asmodea Oaktree (talk) 13:10, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

• I have figured out what was going on. The Template treats all entries as a yes and automatically links to it. I have removed the no entires that created the confusion. This problem is fixed now and my post here was in hindsight unecessary. Asmodea Oaktree (talk) 13:26, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

update on WP:HIST

hi all! checking in briefly. all is well at WP:History. We have added an additional active coordinator, and a new coordinator from another wikiproject to help with assessment. Generally speaking, the project remains inactive overall; our main goal is to serve as a community forum for anyone who may drop by, and also as a partial gateway to history topics in general, and to other wikiprojects that are much more active than our own, for anyone who might be interested. we welcome any thoughts or feedback. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 20:50, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Sm8900, I think you are correct in identifying the lack of responses (to some requests) as a potential problem. You want people to think that WPHIST is a useful place. No one person can know everything, but getting some sort of response might help. You may be able to help find the "right" person by looking at the contributors to related articles or related WikiProjects. If you can ping someone with a personal request, that can help get responses.

Another useful thing, when the request is for help at an article's talk page, is to post a note on the WikiProject's page when someone did reply on the talk page. That makes people reading it feel like the group is being helpful, even if most people don't know anything about the subject.

You might not want to do that for every single request, but I encourage you to try it out on occasion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:17, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing! nice to see you here again. those are all top-notch ideas!! I am going to give some real thought into using those at the wikiproject. you are welcome to drop by any time, and to add any ideas that you wish. thanks for these terrific ideas. see you! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:04, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

by the way, anyone and everyone who works on ancient history, medieval, etc, is welcome to come by. our two new coordinators both have some real expertise in those areas, but we are always eager to have more people in those areas. the average person is not so proficient in those, so we want to extend a special invitation to anyone who might have experience there. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:06, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Note to historical wikiproject coordinators

Hi there. is there anyone else here who serves as a coordinator for wikiprojects on various areas or topics within history? I am the coordinator for Wikiproject History. whatever project you may have, it is almost certain that your project is far more active . my main goal is to make wiki-project history useful as an introductory resource; i.e. as described in the list below:

a) we can help any new editors who would like to learn how to get active in editing history topics in general,

b) we can serve as a community forum, where people can post questions and get answers, and

c) we can try to serve as a conduit and a doorway, where new editors can come by and find their way either to:

1) articles needing work, since we have automated article alerts there.

2) various topics for discussion on our talk page;

3) various other wikiprojects, whose activity levels are far, far greater than ours, such as e.g.: Military history, and Women in Red, etc etc.

So please do write back if you wish. let us know anything we can do that can help, anything you'd like us to promote, or anything else we can do that would be worthwhile.

by the way, I am also currently one of the active editors at Community bulletin board. we have been trying to give this a renewed level of activity, by posting editing drives, contests, and many other group activities there. so you are welcome to let me know if there is anything that you might like me to highlight or to promote there, as well.

I hope that is helpful. I look forward to hearing any ideas, suggestions, requests etc, that you may wish. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 15:14, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

IRC

Should we have a IRC Channel? --Commons is in a thing (talk) 21:22, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Which "we"? There is already an IRC channel for the English Wikipedia in general. I doubt that we need one specifically for the WikiProject Council. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

hm, how about whatsapp? --Sm8900 (talk) 14:59, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

There are also editors on Telegram, Matrix, Discord, and maybe even still Steam. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:47, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

(Yes, there are a handful of editors in Steam groups, but I don't think anyone takes those as serious discussion venues.... --Izno (talk) 16:52, 4 November 2020 (UTC))

WhatamIdoing, that is good to know. I would be very interested in joining any threads on telegram. can you please let me know how I would do so? thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 17:15, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Sm8900, there is information at m:Telegram. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:GLAM/TarfayaPedia

It's not clear to me if Wikipedia:GLAM/TarfayaPedia is a Wikipedia project, but since it is listed in the Projects section at Talk:The Little Prince as a project, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and assumed it is. Otoh, there's been no activity there, so I added a {{WikiProject status|Inactive}} template. But if it is a project, maybe it should be marked 'defunct' instead. Can someone check if this is a project at all, and if so, whether the template should be altered. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 08:08, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

That looks a bit like a cross between a chapter-sponsored event and a WikiProject. I don't know if there is a simple way to classify it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:47, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

A question regarding WikiProjects or wikiprojects

Should "wikiprojects" as a generic term be capitalized? --Soumya-8974 ^talk _contribs ^subpages 09:53, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

@Soumya-8974 I'd say that's a matter of personal taste and not really something we need to hold a discussion about. How one spells Wikipedia-specific things is of no consequence, all that matters is that the others understand what one is referring to. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:31, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

I had a dispute with SMcCandlish about whether "wikiprojects" should be capitalized when talking about Category:Defunct newsletters of WikiProjects. I thought a discussion would be necessary to resolve the dispute. --Soumya-8974 ^talk _contribs ^subpages 05:22, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

@Soumya-8974 I see, this is about this CfD discussion. Reading that discussion, I think you can say there is consensus that capitalising as 'WikiProject' is preferable for consistency. If you want to change this in other places, I think you can just go ahead - perhaps someone will disagree and you have to discuss. But holding a centralised discussion about such a trivial thing would be a waste of time. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 19:47, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

I don't think that we use it as a "generic" term. A WikiProject is a specific thing (a group of people who want to work together to improve Wikipedia), not just any old project that has some connection to any old wiki. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Relevant RM

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disability/Style guide#Requested move 20 November 2020
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:53, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Pls take a look

Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#‎How can we better consolidate and discourage creation of overly-specific WikiProjects?.--Moxy 🍁 23:53, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy: sorry I missed this, but what was the conclusion, if any? I agree this is often a problem. More of a problem is a single editor creating a project that is never going to be active. An extreme policy might be to enforce a policy of having at least 10 active members before creating a new project. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:57, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Public art

Back in July 2019, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Public Art, I asked members to consider whether or not the project should be converted into a task force. No replies. I see an editor has just marked the project as 'semi-active', so I've raised the question once again. Just an FYI, but also soliciting feedback from Council page watchers. FWIW, I edit articles about public art all the time, but I mostly use WikiProject Sculpture and WikiProject Visual arts for collaboration. Thanks! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:35, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

@Another Believer: What project do you propose to make it a task force of? Perhaps you should ask the receiving project if they are keen? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:54, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

MSGJ, I think Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts is the most appropriate umbrella project by far. There's a standalone project for Sculpture but not all public art is sculpture. I've not asked WP Visual arts for feedback but I'd say most Public Art articles are also tagged as part of WikiProject Visual arts because of the overlap. Let's just say almost all public art articles should be tagged as part of WikiProject Visual arts. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 22:00, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Advice for advertising relaunched projects?

I've been posting a bunch at/linking to WikiProject Usability trying to revive that project, but it doesn't really seem to have drawn in many editors. I'm also involved in some recent discussions at Articles for improvement, which really ought to be a lot more active than it is. Would you all have any advice about how to advertise a relaunched WikiProject or otherwise draw in editors to it? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:59, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

I would think that 'usability' is just another word for 'accessibility', which already has a semi-active project at WP:WikiProject Accessibility (presumably to parallel WP:ACCESS). --Izno (talk) 12:54, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Izno, that's somewhat tangential to the question I'm asking, but to answer, they're not the same. WikiProject Accessibility (both in how it defines itself and de facto in how it focuses its efforts) is primarily about ensuring Wikipedia works for those with disabilities, whereas WikiProject Usability looks at more general issues. To take a recent example, the VPR discussion on moving the featured/GA topicons to be next to the title was something I shared to the project as it's relevant to the scope. It (like all usability discussions) needs to keep accessibility in mind as a top priority, but assisting those with disabilities was not the impetus for the proposal. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:02, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Sdkb, posting it here was a good first step. I'm not sure if I'll contribute that much, but at least I added it to my watchlist. Keep up the good work! --MarioGom (talk) 09:12, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Inappropriate deletion of Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Jimmy_Dore by UnitedStatesian

I created this WP:Project in order to improve Wikipedia by making Jimmy Dore's entry look more like an encyclopedia article, similar to Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Frank Zappa, or Banksy (artists most similar to JD).

Notice this project was deleted by UnitedStatesian (talk) (a non-admin? how?) who added this snarky comment,

>> "The proposed WikiProject was not created; the proposer does not understand the function and purpose of WikiProjects"

Oh really? I spent several hours studying the docs before I created the page. Additionally, I have been a WP editor for 17 years. That kind of remark is utterly offensive, juvenille, disrespectful, and completely inappropriate.

I would caution UnitedStatesian that comments which berate another WP Editor, instead of dispassionately discussing the edit, are inappropriate and may denote bullying. See, WP:BULLY, which states:

>> Doing so violates Wikipedia's civility policy which states that "even a single act of severe incivility could result in a block..."

Additionally, there are many problems with this delete.

1: This deletion was less than 48 hours after Kingsif (talk) filed a single OPPOSE vote. He said:

• Oppose You're wanting to make a project just to focus improvements on one article, where the main concern is BLP. Just go to the Biographies WikiProject and ask for help. Kingsif (talk) 16:59, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

2: I was not given the opportunity to respond. I have limited time in a day. I don't always log in to WP every day.

3: I have no interest in joining a WikiProject about BLPs or Biographies in general.

I proposed a Jimmy Dore Project page SPECIFICALLY, because that is my interest. Not only is Jimmy Dore immensely popular, but topics he covers are at an intersection of ideas I am also interested in: Political Dysfunction of the Left in Modern America, Corporate Media Criticism, War & Peace, Censorship, etc.

4: There are *potentially* a dozen pages which might mention Jimmy Dore (see pages which mention Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks for example, arguably artists most similar to Dore). However any edits which attempt to add important biographical information about Jimmy Dore on WP are met with speedy reverts, including by the notorious meta-User:Philip Cross, known to vandalize pages of prominent anti-war voices. This seems to be an organized effort.

5: There is at least one WP:Project proposal with a focus on a single artist: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Justin_Bieber

6: There are at least 20 WP:Project pages with a focus on a single living artist, or noteworthy person:

Bob Dylan, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé,Demi Lovato, Donald Trump, Dua Lipa, Gwen Stefani, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Meghan Trainor, Madonna, Shakira,Taylor Swift, Brandy, Ariana Grande

7: These WP:Project pages are devoted to individual deceased persons

Frank Sinatra, Leibniz

8: These WP:Project pages are devoted to a fictional person:

Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, James Bond, King Arthur (arguably fictional)

9: And there there is this:

Wikipedia:WikiProject_RuPaul's_Drag_Race

10: I can see no Wikipedia:Project criteria which was violated. I have checked here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council, Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-04-01/WikiProject_report, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide

11: None of the criteria mentioned at "Under what circumstances are WikiProjects deleted from Wikipedia rather than marked as defunct or historical?" in Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-04-01/WikiProject_report have been met, especially since this was only a PROPOSAL.

12: The article was not moved to my namespace as suggested by WP:REVIVE.

13: I was not notified as required by WP:SPEEDY, nor was WP:SPEEDY followed as far as I can tell.

14: I was not given sufficient time to obtain the support of "at least 6 to 12 active Wikipedians" as suggested by Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide#Proposing_a_project as a criteria for a project to succeed.

15: In fact, this same page says the following:

>> projects that are likely to succeed tend to start with at least 6 to 12 active Wikipedians. Once that threshold is reached, the proposal can be considered successful and the project created (see below). If there is insufficient support to start the project after a few months....

"A few Months?" My project was up for ~48 HOURS!

16: Additionally, Template:Archived_WikiProject_Proposal_notcreated says this:

>> After a WikiProject Proposal has run for three months, it is archived to make room for new proposals.

"THREE MONTHS." My project was up for ~48 HOURS. C'mon.

Thus, I have asked UnitedStatesian on his (talk) page to restore my Wikipedia Project Proposal, since it appears his deletion was hasty. --Bill Huston ^(talk) 10:34, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

• I don't see any harm in keeping the proposal open. There's not much that a WikiProject can offer here that cannot already be done at Talk:Jimmy Dore, and I think it's unlikely to gain significant traction, but I don't see why it cannot be attempted. --MarioGom (talk) 10:56, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
• Please read WP:TLDR and WP:SHOUT's advice on boldface, and then come back and make your case concisely. WikiProjects are very rarely appropriate for individual people, and you'll need to present a strong case for why Dore should be an exception. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 14:42, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
  • User:Sdkb: WP:TLDR seems to apply to articles, not to Talk: pages. As for WP:SHOUT, fair enough, but I spent several hours crafting this comment to be as concise as possible, and with selective bolding to make it easy to scan rapidly. In sum:
    1. My proposal was hastily deleted, in apparent violation of Wikipedia rules, which require that a proposal be open for 3 months. (Mine was closed after 2 days!)
    2. I feel I was bullied by UnitedStatesian, in violation of WP rules.
    3. I cited more than 20 examples of Projects devoted to a single person.
    4. I have already made the argument for why Dore should be an exception in the proposal itself, and also here in the "TLDR" which you don't want to read.
    5. I cannot make any further defense with an inappropriately closed Project. Please reopen. --Bill Huston ^(talk) 15:57, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
• WP:Other stuff exists. We shouldn't have any projects dedicated to specific people. (You might be able to sell me on this disastrous presidency, but that can be as easily covered under the existing US Presidents project.) Inevitably, your project will become inactive and subsequently defunct, potentially merged into another or outright deleted or simply left to decay. Find another project to contribute to where the person in question is covered under and save us and yourself the inevitable grief. I'm not going to bother reading the rant and frankly think this is an example of why we need to change this process and fundamentally how all WikiProjects less than active are structured. Merhe and redirect the lot so we aren't giving false ideas to innocent contributors that they're being "helpful" by starting Yet Another Project. Especially when those innocent contributors have been here for a decade and still haven't figured that much out. --Izno (talk) 15:36, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

  Agree {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:29, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject Council working across Wikis?

Hi! I am interested to know if WikiProject Council works with other languages in Wikipedia and if it coordinates with Wikimedia sister projects? Zblace (talk) 11:53, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Linux project seems inactive

The Linux WikiProject seems to be inactive. Can we update its status in the WikiProjects space? -proxxz ^talk 07:21, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Why? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:31, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Sandbox organiser

Sandbox Organiser A place to help you organise your work

Hi all

I've been working on a tool for the past few months that you may find useful. Wikipedia:Sandbox organiser is a set of tools to help you better organise your draft articles and other pages in your userspace. It also includes areas to keep your to do lists, bookmarks, list of tools. You can customise your sandbox organiser to add new features and sections. Once created you can access it simply by clicking the sandbox link at the top of the page. You can create and then customise your own sandbox organiser just by clicking the button on the page. All ideas for improvements and other versions would be really appreciated.

Huge thanks to PrimeHunter and NavinoEvans for their work on the technical parts, without them it wouldn't have happened.

John Cummings (talk) 11:00, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Edit requests

Would someone mind closing the proposal above as successful per the instructions at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals#Closing_proposals? P,TO 19104 (talk) (contribs) 18:55, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

P,TO 19104, you can do so yourself after you've created the project page (note that the outcomes for wikiproject proposals are created and not created). Given that the proposal is not there to determine consensus but rather the number of interested people, there is no need for someone to close the discussion before the project can be created. In fact, the proposal is closed when the project has been created.

About creating the page: you could use {{wikiproject}} as a starting point, though you would have to cut some stuff out that's specific to subject-area wikiprojects; you could also not use that. Maybe discuss a bit with the other prospective participants about how the page should be organised; it can all be changed later, of course, so don't waste time trying to make it perfect. If you need any help, feel free to ask me. PJvanMill)talk( 22:46, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 1 March 2021

please how can I write a musician article Em-rich58 (talk) 09:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

To editor Em-rich58:  Note: Please read and digest Help:Your first article to find the answers you want. Thank you for your interest! P.I. Ellsworth  ed. ^put'r there 11:45, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 22 February 2021

It says I need to be registered to edit. I am, and I think something is wrong with protection. ThatDislikedOne (talk) 19:52, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

@ThatDislikedOne: Perhaps the message wasn't clear. For semi-protected pages, your account needs to be autoconfirmed. This usually happens automatically when your account is at least four days old and you have at least 10 edits. Just be patient. RudolfRed (talk) 20:00, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

That account is now WP:GLOCKed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:06, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Simplify marking WikiProject status on talk page

See discussion Template talk:WikiProject banner shell#Add class/importance attribute on shell and please advise where else is right forum to discuss. I know it's potentially a major change. Shushugah (talk) 20:42, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

That's a tricky template. I think the people you want to talk to are the ones who have spent the most time editing that template, so I recommend checking the template's history page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:07, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Members and participants

User:SMcCandlish recently edited multiple pages to remove words like "membership" and "joining". The edit summaries say that WikiProjects are "just pages for collaboration". (This contradicts WP:WikiProject, which opens with a statement that a WikiProject is a group of editors, and the FAQ at the top of this page, which says that a WikiProject "is not a subject area, a collection of pages, or a list of articles tagged by the group."

It is possible to be a member of a group without the group being a membership organization, and I think the idea of "joining" a group has some value for some editors, even though in practice, "participation" is far more important than having your name recorded on a membership list. What do the rest of you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

There's nothing at all contradictory between A) a wikiproject being a page (usually with subpages) at which editors collaborate and gather collaboration-related resources, for a particular topic, and B) it not being a subject area (a WP:Category), a collection of pages (a WP:Portal), or a list of articles (a list, or a subtype thereof: an index, an outline, or a set index article). The fact that "collection of pages" is ambiguous is a copy-editing matter, not a rallying point for anti-WP:Common sense misinterpretation. That is, if the wording doesn't suit the reality, fix the wording, don't try to bend the reality.

When wikiprojects turn into problems – which is quite frequently, as it's been the central cause of large number of ArbCom cases and decisions, as well as the main reason for the creation of the WP:CONLEVEL policy – it is almost invariably because the project has started acting as if it is a private membership organization, capable of excluding other editors and their input, of making up its own rules against site-wide consensus, of inventing its own processes to bypass site-wide ones, of acting as "canvassing farms", of behaving in a WP:VESTED manner, and in trying to exert WP:OWNership over entire categories of content the project claims is within scope. We were well on the way to ridding wikiprojects of "join" and "member" language, until the now-dead but still-deployed WP:WikiProject X templating system hard-coded these terms.

When people have tried to set up explicit membership organizations (even ones that apparently did good things), the community has been swift and firm in shutting them down (see, e.g., the history of WP:Esperanza, a precursor of what is now WP:Teahouse). When wikiprojects are set up with an obvious intent to over-control content, they are also shut down, even more swiftly and firmly (one example among several: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Wikiproject English). I.e., there is a clear consensus that wikiprojects cannot act as exclusive membership organizations and cannot control content topics (see also WP:ARBPRINCIPLES#Building consensus: WikiProjects and WP:ARBPRINCIPLES#Function of WikiProjects and WP:ARBPRINCIPLES#Levels of consensus); we should not continue to use language which has encouraged problems of this sort.

Back to "fix the wording, don't try to bend the reality": The reality is that no one has to sign up as a "member" of a wikiproject to use it and participate in discussions at it. The only reason for these lists/categories of editors is to help one editor participating in the project find another potentially interested in working on the same content (hopefully a still-active editor). Secondarily, it also helps illustrate whether a project is active or not, though this is probably better determined by wikiproject talk page activity level. Being a "member" cannot confer any rights or privileges, and gives no one more weight in any discussion (though you will unfortunately see people attempt to pull this crap: "Why should we listen to User:Foobar? They're not even a member of WikiProject Bazzquux!"). In years of randomly and gradually (not robotically and forcefully) updating this wording to use "participate in" and "participants" instead of "join" and "members", I have run into virtually no opposition, until last week when I discovered that the WikiProject X stuff is hard-coded to look for a page named /Members as part of its scripting (which is a reparable problem), and one wikiproject, WP:WikiProject Women in Red, which has the unusual distinction of organizing lots of off-site events, has been using "members" to mean participants in the wikiproject, and "participants" to mean participants in the events (which is also a reparable problem, e.g. "WikiProject participants" and "event participants" or "WikiProject participants" and "event attendees", or whatever).

Finally, the sooner we get to consistently using the same terminology across all wikiprojects (probably the last step would be renaming the categories and patching the userbox templates that use them), then the better able we'll be to have bots and other tools do stuff for all wikiprojects without bugs being triggered by inconsistent page names and template parameters.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:05, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I haven't fully read SMC's long comment above, but my view is that yeah, it'd probably slightly be better to use terminology like "participant" rather than "member" to subtly dissuade any temptation to brigade, but I doubt it'll have much of an impact. This is a trivial bit of semantics that never appears to casual readers, so I think we have far better things to do than argue over it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:19, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I definitely agree that this is not worth arguing about, so in the interest of not wasting other editors' time I'd urge SMcCandlish to simply accept it when someone reverts this on a particular wikiproject page. Also, I think consistently using the same terminology across all wikiprojects should not be a goal: wikiprojects making their own choices on inconsequential terminology is not a problem, and trying to make all wikiprojects conform will very likely fail. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 14:02, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I have on occasion had project "members" complain to me that I'm "not even a project member" when I work on pages that their project "owns". I've added myself as a member on a few projects (sometimes in reaction to that complaint), bu the projects I actively participate in are not strongly overlapping the ones I'm listed as a member of. So yes, I understand why SMcCandlish is trying to suppress those "member" tendencies. Is there an argument to prefer going back on what he fixed? Dicklyon (talk) 16:24, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

The four edits I saw were the ones to WikiProject Council guidance pages ([1], [2], [3], [4]), all of which are fine with me. Basically I agree with Sdkb: I think "participant" is slightly better than "member", but I doubt the word choice will influence group dynamics on Wikipedia much. If SM thinks these tweaks will help things run more harmoniously here, then I'm all for it, and I hope he's right. Ajpolino (talk) 18:07, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, the problem with "a wikiproject being a page (usually with subpages) at which editors collaborate" is that that is not what the definition of WikiProject is. A WikiProject actually is "the editors who collaborate", and not the page(s) where part of their collaboration is visible.

The definition you give in your first paragraph and the one you appear to use in your second paragraph are self-contradictory. Groups of editors cause problems. "A page (usually with subpages)" never does. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

That's an ... inventive interpretation, and it actually proposes, when you boil it down, precisely what consensus is against, that wikiprojects are membership clubs. It's also demonstrably counterfactual, anyway. E.g. WP:WikiProject Dogs became completely moribund (that is, all active editors participating in it either abandoned the wikiproject or abandoned Wikipedia entirely, and all wikproject work and activity ceased). Yet within a year or so, a new set of editors arrived at it and kick started it again, and I started participating in it again. It is a not a different wikiproject. It is at the same name, has the same resources and subpages (though we merged some of them to reduce pointless complexity), uses the same templates, works on the same articles in the same categories, etc., etc. It is not "WikiProject Dogs II", it's WikiProject Dogs. I think you're approach this from a "the Beatles consist of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and ..." perspective, focused on individuals, rather than looking at it more like "Wikipedia consists of the output of, and internal resources for, all who wish to work on it". WikiProjects are a topical microcosm of Wikipedia itself, and failure to understand this – the habit of sliding into a walled-garden, private-clubhouse, very un-wiki mentality about wikiprojects – is the root cause of all problems associated with and emanating from wikiprojects, which are the collective reason that so many editors simply want to shut them all down has having outlived their alleged usefulness. Support for the idea of doing so grows every year, but I think taking that route would be a mistake. It's why I care to try to dig the psychological triggers for this sort of behavior up by their roots. PS: I am in no way contradicting myself, you're just following the simple reasoning here: Wikiprojects are collaboration resources. They only become a problem when people misintepret them as, and attempt to turn them into, membership organizations, like private clubs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:08, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

From the very first sentence of WP:WikiProject and the WP:WikiProject Council/Guide: "A WikiProject is a group of contributors". From the very first day of the WikiProject Guide:  A WikiProject is an inherently social construct (bold in the original).

You can have a social group (that article used to be linked in that first sentence) without having an exclusive members-only club. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:42, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Projects hate it when non "participants" jump in and change long standing wording, layouts preferences and especially when project made templates are merged..... one of many reasons Wiki projects fall into disuse.... that is there collaborative work gets dismissed. In this case here not seeing a big change..... more like British vs American English change. But would advice that individual projects should not be made to deal with long drawn out talks or edit wars over simple wording of this nature.--Moxy 🍁 04:55, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

I see, by the way, that in wp:WikiProject, "members" has recently been replaced by "project's participants". That would seem to pave the way for more widespread changes in terminology, unless there are strong objections.--Ipigott (talk) 09:47, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

@Moxy: But, see... if what you're describing about what "project hate" is accurate, then it's very much a problem, and helps to justify evangelizing a revised idea of just what constitutes a WikiProject and/or its activities.

Projects hate it when non "participants" jump in and change long standing wording, layouts preferences and especially when project made templates are merged

First off, a project can't make a template, it doesn't have the ability to submit edits to a wiki. Some editor or editors created those templates, perhaps acting on behalf of other editors aligned with the project, or implementing the collaborative decisions of those project participants, but nevertheless all templates are the creations of a specific editor or editors, not "a project".

that is there collaborative work gets dismissed.

Whose work is getting dismissed? Or, to put it another way, how is the merge of a "project created" template, or a change to "long standing wording" that's somehow considered WP:OWNed "by the project", different from changes made to any other Wikipedia content, all of which was the work of some editor or editors?

What you're really arguing for is for project-"blessed" content to be treated specially, for it to somehow be more immune to the business-as-usual activities of the community — wherein templates get merged, wording gets changed, and layouts get tweaked all the time — simply because it has the project stamp of approval affixed to it. Basically, as I'm interpreting your statement, the position of those involved in the project is that, because they got together as a group and decided on something, that local consensus should be treated as sacrosanct or binding by the entire Wikipedia community, regardless of broader consensus decisions?

That's incorrect. In fact, it's pretty explicitly exactly what WikiProjects are not intended to represent. So, there's value in anything that gets people out of that mindset where they participate in a WikiProject as a means of establishing a Local Consensus Cabal (or LCC, ™ and © 2021 FeRDNYC) which gives their communal decisions greater weight or special standing within the Wikipedia community. If working to downplay the notion of personal Membership in a WikiProject will combat, or even might help to combat the LCC mentality, then it feels worth doing.

WhatamIdoing and SMcCandlish have both presented their concept of what a WikiProject is, but I'm going to advocate for a model that's slightly different from both of their positions — but I feel is supported by the spirit, if not the literal wording, of organizing documents like Wikipedia:WikiProject and etc.

A WikiProject, in my view, is neither the group of people collaborating under its banner, nor the organizational content they create. Rather, a WikiProject is the editing activities performed by those editors as they work to improve the encyclopedia. (Because remember, we are all here to build an encyclopedia.) More specifically, a WikiProject represents a collaborative effort to drive edits to (or affecting) Wikipedia articles. Creating extra-article content (project pages; project templates, scripts, and bots; even project Talk page discussions) is all well and good, and it may facilitate the project's editorial goals, but in the end all of that should be in service of the only project activities that really matter: Improving articles in the main namespace.

Without that, and if a project isn't doing that, then all other project activities are meaningless. Including any establishment of "membership" in the project — what does that even mean, if it doesn't involve making edits to the encyclopedia?

Heck, if people want to declare their "membership" in this or that WikiProject, they can do it the way we handle every other sort of tribal community peacocking: They can put a userbox on their userpage. That's what it's for. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 13:47, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

I have to observe that "Projects hate it when non "participants" jump in and change long standing wording ..." is basically proving my point for me. As declared participant in a wikiproject you have no more WP:OWN/WP:VESTED right to edit/control a page at that wikiproject than any other editor.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:02, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

I have some doubts about the premise here. Can we have a few examples, ideally from the last few years? For example, I don't know whether @Moxy is referring to something like WikiProject Composers' infobox war, or if he's talking about someone re-writing the WikiProject's pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes take over of project pages...... recent examples I can think of is here at the council page when it was completely reworked out of the blue by someone who never participatedin the project. The other example would be the history project....was completely redone giving it some sort of weird hierarchy that has completely killed the project.--Moxy 18:10, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

The wikiproject council is not a wikiproject, though. It's a sort of layer above the wikiprojects.

Anyway, I think this all depends. Certainly, any pages with editing guidance must not contradict the global consensus. But for content that is (1) only about the internal organisation of the wikiproject and where (2) on the level of global consensus, there is only a slight preference (as would be my interpretation of the consensus about the terminology choice of "participants" vs "members"), I'd say the consensus among the project participants(/members) is important. And I'm not familiar with the history wikiproject, but what Moxy describes, if done without discussion with the project's members(/participants), seems to me like an action that one would be justified in reverting (at least, I cannot think of a strong P&G-based argument for changing the structure of a wikiproject like that). Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 20:03, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

I think we're a WikiProject. A WikiProject is a group of editors who want to work together to improve Wikipedia, right? That pretty much describes the reason most of the regulars hang out on this page. Our method of improving Wikipedia is sort of at one or two removes, but it's still the same goal.

What Moxy refers to is largely an effort by one editor whose enthusiasm led him into being overly bold here last January. (Also, WPHIST wasn't a beehive of activity beforehand, so I don't think we can fairly say that he killed it, or even that it's dead.) I think Moxy's correct about the social dynamics there. If you want to win friends and influence people, you don't appear out of nowhere and re-write "their" pages. You hang out for a while, make sure that the group accepts you as "one of us", and then you re-write "our" pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:11, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree entirely with WhatamIdoing. with respect, the changes that I made at WP:HIST were not detrimental. I have brought in new project coordinators, who are more active than myself, and whose expertise is greater than my own. they have been able to offer some highly valuable insights to the multiple editors who continue to use the wiki project as a forum. So my own experience there entirely supports SMcCandlish --Sm8900 (talk) 23:52, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

uniti aedificamus. new useful update, on some doings at WikiProject History. --Sm8900 (talk) 15:52, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Congratulations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:17, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

The reasons I don't consider the council to be a wikiproject itself are: (1) its activities do not involve editing articles (2) the council has some amount of influence on all wikiprojects. Specifically (2) makes me think that the 'regulars' should not have any bigger a say in anything, including matters of presentation and internal structure. But I admit I'm nitpicking. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 12:45, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia:WikiProject Manual of Style not a WikiProject? What about Wikipedia:WikiProject User warnings? Or Wikipedia:WikiProject Templates or Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam? Or Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange? The point is that you can have a group of editors who want to work together to improve Wikipedia even if their area of collaboration isn't directly in the mainspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Good point, WhatamIdoing. Indeed, "editing articles" is not the right thing to look at. I suppose the better point is that nearly all that happens at the council is discussion. It feels much more like a forum to me than a project. I recognize though that at this point I'm talking about what it "feels like to me", and that there are perfectly legitimate definitions of "wikiproject" that would include the council. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 14:35, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

I think this is more of a "talking shop" than a "local productivity" group, which means that it overlaps with some other concepts (e.g., noticeboards – especially since some of our discussions involve dispute resolution). But I think we're still within the bounds of the WikiProject definition. I do agree with you that we're not representative of a typical WikiProject. If you wanted to show someone what a regular WikiProject looked like, you'd probably pick something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Anecdotal: I watchlist a couple of WikiProjects, and participate on their talk pages frequently, but have never added myself to the member list of one. I think most WikiProjects are just a "X noticeboard", e.g. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Templates is just "the template editing noticeboard" in my eyes. There are some which are more organised structures, like WP:MILHIST, but these are few and far between. I think adding one to the membership list of one is fine. But I agree I prefer the term "participant". Membership often implies some kind of exclusive group that you sign up for, usually involving fees or selection, and the concept of "outsiders". It's a small semantic difference, not one I care much about, but I guess strictly speaking the word "participant" is better. On the broader issue, more anecdotes, ime WikiProject participation does not tend to be closed, but some do try to exercise dominance on content, sometimes even rejecting consensuses formed outside their project. Which is insane, to me. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 07:01, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Ways to get involved

I just posted an "ad" for Wikipedia:Feedback request service, and it occurred to me that we could probably come up with a list of things that would help people remember about ways to help and ways that they can get help. I've previously posted about Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library, and I sometimes advertise individual split or merge proposals. What do you do to help connect people to opportunities? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:27, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I like using Wikipedia ads and putting userboxes to promote the subject. –Wizdzy 23:24, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether anyone is watching Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Article alerts these days, so I sometimes copy interesting items out of it and onto the main discussion page. We were talking about DYKs, and there was a surprisingly good group (it's usually all BLPs and organizations, which don't interest the group as much), so I just posted a batch yesterday. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

new doings at Wikipedia: Community bulletin board

Hi. a few of us have initiated a new effort to use Wikipedia: Community bulletin board as a current resource. we have been editing it to reflect new editing drives, new group efforts and projects, new or recurring editing drives at WikiProjects, and a whole variety of current efforts and activities.

this new effort began several months ago. please come by the page to view this if you have not done so already. and please, feel free to add listings for any current activities at your own favorite wikiprojects, group activities, or anything else. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:09, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

What advantage do you think that page has, compared to posting an announcement at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:30, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: excellent question. but just take a look at the left side of the screen. there is a permanent link there to Wikipedia:Community Portal, and the WP Bulletin Board is permanently transcluded there!! I appreciate your important question, to discuss that. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 17:52, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

It sounds like that might reach more non-editors, then. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:51, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

yes, I think so. I appreciate your positive and helpful reply on that. thanks! ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 17:42, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

FAR for Flag of Portugal

I have nominated Flag of Portugal for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. (t · c) buidhe 04:41, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Anything still to do with WikiProject X?

So I think most are familar with what happened, and didn't happen, with Wikipedia:WikiProject X. Nothing wrong with failed experiments, as Thomas Edison would tell you. But does it make sense to consider putting the projects that are on the WPX format back onto the standard project setup? Seems like the standard format is easier to maintain, and that Wikipedia overall, and the WPX projects themselves, would benefit from a return to cross-project consistency. Before I raise at the projects themselves, any thoughts here? Thanks in advance, UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:34, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

If you want to offer to change a project's pages to "standard format", make the offer on the project's talk page. See what response you get. I would not object for any project I am listed on, participate in, or watch, but cannot speak for anyone else. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 03:14, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

More importantly, perhaps, is it worth the effort? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 03:16, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks PS. I think it makes the projects more useful going forward. Given there are less than 30 on WP:X (out of >1,000 active and semi-active total), seems like a small effort to regain consistency. I will follow the project talk-by-project talk approach you suggest. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:12, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Decentralize/disband WikiProject Cities?

In August I proposed that WikiProject Cities remove its importance parameter in favor of a "core" list of 50 cities and various taskforces otherwise, as has been done for WikiProject Biographies and WikiProject Film. I did not receive any substantial response at that time, and looking at subsequent activity at its talkpage the majority of messages/discussions are either procedural in nature such as FARs or receive at most one response.

Which brings me to my next point, that it appears that WikiProject Cities is rather moribund (even by WikiProject standards) and its aim appears to be too diffuse. NYC and Beijing, London and Singapore, Chicago and Buenos Aires, and Paris and Shanghai don't particularly have much in common except that they are all a rather ubiquitous type of human settlement. A current (as in, September) proposal for a Megacities WikiProject has one !vote, an oppose of its aim being too diverse; what do you think cities in general are?

So I propose that we dissolve WikiProject Cities (Esperanzify it, if you will) and replace it with one of the following:

• Megacities should go in the proposed Megacity project should it come to fruition; if not, the below option could do as well.
• Everything else should be covered by their respective national WikiProject or other arrangement. New York City, London, and Chicago have their own WikiProjects, just to name a few. Los Angeles and San Francisco are covered by their own respective taskforces in the California WikiProject, and most American cities are treated similarly. For cities in other countries, their respective country's WikiProject (or other such thing, e.g. WikiProject Africa for African cities) could take charge in improving it. The argument that this would disadvantage cities in the developing world, whose WikiProjects might not be the most active, would be more convincing were WikiProject Cities itself active.

Apologies if this is not the correct process for such an action, of which I am unaware and to which I am willing to be directed. A notice of this discussion has been posted on the WikiProject's talkpage. If this gets enough traction and is felt proper, I could put this on centralized discussion, but that seems a bit much for right now. Thank you for your attention and consideration.

 – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 00:19, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

• I don't mind dissolving that project. I never consulted it although I've written or edited a score or more of articles about cities or relating somehow to them. I have never had it on my watch list; in fact, I didn't know it existed. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:04, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
• KEEP - it is a common place to discuss issues with city articles. This project discusses the layout and contents of cities of all sizes, including tiny cities too, thus it can't be replaced with something called Megacities. Did anyone notice the talk page has 22 archives, which means it is being used by editors. Also, Wikipedia:USCITIES is hosted here too, which is critical importance to keep for U.S. city editors, which expands to Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/US Guideline (do not delete). • Sbmeirow • Talk • 10:42, 26 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Only five of those archives postdate 2015, meaning that they largely date to the 2000s and early 2010s. Of those, the majority are, as said above, either procedural posts like FACs or FARs or posts that get either zero or one reply. I don't recall using USCITIES for my content work, but assuming it is in fact useful to a substantial portion of editors it can likely be moved to WikiProject United States (which itself is a fairly bloated project IMO) or userfied, or WikiProject Cities can be itself archived while the USCITIES subpage (and presumably several others like it) remain.  – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 12:54, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

This is more recent activity, which is more important to me --> Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities/US Guideline - • Sbmeirow • Talk • 12:17, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

• Delete per nom. This wikiproject is largely defunct or inactive as User:John M Wolfson pointed out the lack of participation post2015.Catchpoke (talk) 17:28, 8 May 2021 (UTC)
• Keep. I disagree putting the responsibility to each national Wikiprojects. There's also guidelines and layouts on cities article which at some point helps standarization of cities article. There's also a need to have cities such as both Paris and New York under one Wikiproject tag, something that national Wikiprojects cant do. If the only common thing between them is that they are human settlement, then I suppose renaming the project to Wikiproject Human Settlement is a choice? Nyanardsan (talk) 11:33, 10 May 2021 (UTC)
  • I disagree that There's also a need to have cities such as both Paris and New York under one Wikiproject tag, since both are articles that will be heavily edited even without any WikiProject, and both have their own WikiProjects. Assuming you're correct, however, should every single village or other incorporated place in the whole world be included? If not, what precisely would be the cutoff? That's also not touching the idea of people not actually using any of the guideline stuff, which I've personally never used.  – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 12:57, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

    A WikiProject is a group of editors who want to work together. The "cutoff" is: whatever pages that group happens to feel like working on, even if that list does not make sense to any other editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• First off we don't delete; the only option for a project such as this is to mark as semi-active/inactive/defunct. If people are not actively using the project to collaborate (as seems to be the case), then I would mark the project as inactive (maybe first put it semi-active for a period of time) and see if anyone appears to reactivate it. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:39, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Reviving Countering systemic bias in religion Wikiproject

It baffles me that the “Countering Systemic Bias in religion” page has been defunct for a while, with the last posts being from 2006-2007. In a post-2020 world, where the struggle for survival during has a pandemic has brought so much political and religious vision, prejudice of different kinds, including those on racial, class, ethnic and religious lines are more problematic than ever. People who are divided on COVID-19 related policies are also interestingly enough, demarcated by political and religious differences. I propose that this page may be reactivated, so that those who have editing issues in the category of religion may have a specialized area to find solutions for related grievances.

Please see the following journal articles for relevant scholarship:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1387609?seq=1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7482621/

Coffeebreak80s (talk) 23:42, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

@Coffeebreak80s, a Wikipedia:WikiProject is a group of editors. If you want to WP:REVIVE an inactive WikiProject, you need to build a new group of editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

WP:Rocketry

I revived WP:Rocketry a few weeks ago. But since then, only two new members joined. What do I do? StarshipSLS (Talk), (My Contributions) 14:02, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

@StarshipSLS, to WP:REVIVE a WikiProject, you need to make people feel welcome and that their contributions matter. This is a months-long or even year-long task, so settle in for the long haul. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:13, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I think I'm doing well so far. StarshipSLS (Talk), (My Contributions) 12:03, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@StarshipSLS, you might find a couple of related WikiProjects (such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomy) and ask them if some of their experienced editors would please put the Rocketry group's page on their watchlist, as a favor to you and to help you since you're a relatively new editor. Having more people watching the page means more people who might join the discussions or help you out if you get in a jam. You might also find it useful to watch some of their pages, so that you can meet more people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:21, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

AFC request

Hi there! Hope you are doing great. I just wrote a draft of my new article and was wondering if there is any chance someone can check it and help me understand if the article is ok. Also, that would be great if this draft could be reviewed faster than 6 months. Many thanks :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Bit4you

Hey, it's me again :) Just wanted to make sure, someone saw my message at the top. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Anna levchuk (talk • contribs) 06:46, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Anna levchuk (talk • contribs) 09:04, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Anna levchuk, you may have more luck at a more specific venue like Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptocurrency. I've also repaired the COI declaration template that you seem to have tried placing on your user page, hopefully that's in your best interest. AngryHarpy‍^talk 16:05, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you so much!

Article rating

Hi! I was wondering if to rate the importance of an article in the scope of the WikiProject there is any previous requirement, such as the editor being part of the WikiProject or a specific guideline to follow. Thanks beforehand! --NoonIcarus (talk) 12:03, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

• Not really, but do look at the WikiProject's assessment criteria if there are any.  – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 13:34, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Roger that, thanks! --NoonIcarus (talk) 23:30, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

yes you can rate any article you want despite of the interest thank you!! Baloyi khazamulae (talk) 20:00, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

you're welcome!! Baloyi khazamulae (talk) 20:01, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Project 'Reference works' marked inactive

I've marked Wikipedia:WikiProject Reference works as 'inactive'. If this isn't sufficient notification, let me know if I should add this to WP:VPM or anywhere else. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:29, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Membership guidelines

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Membership guidelines. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 10:39, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Statistics

Is there anywhere that shows basic usage metrics for projects? I am trying to revive a couple and wanted good examples. Most traffic, Most pages, Most participants...Even the top 10 in any/each category would be helpful. Could the Council start working on Assessing Projects? (FA, A, B, C, Stub/New)?? (and, "Yes", if necessary, I can volunteer to help...) Mjquinn_id (talk) 20:55, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Greetings @Mjquinn id:. If you have an example of a WikiProject you are interested in I may be able to give you a tour of the system. At least as much of it as I know. —¿philoserf? (talk) 21:37, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Help merging a taskforce template into a Wikiproject template

Hello all, I am trying to merge Template:WikiProject Philippine History, which represents what is already a task force, into Template:WikiProject Tambayan Philippines. I have implemented changes into Template:WikiProject Tambayan Philippines/sandbox. Advice on whether that code is correct, and how to transition the templates (could it be automatic or will it have to be done one by one?) are very much appreciated. (Previous discussion on this is at Template talk:WPBannerMeta#Merging one banner into another.) Best, CMD (talk) 13:36, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

It looks good to me, it mainly would need to edit Template:WikiProject Philippine History and redirect it to Wikipedia:Tambayan Philippines/Task force Philippine History and its talk page can be ignores since it was barely used to begin with. I'd say it's ready for merging already. One note, on the task_force page itself, there should be clearer navigation back to the main project, but that's an easy fix. For example see Wikipedia:WikiProject Sexology and sexuality/Sex work task force which has backlinks back to broader Wikipedia:WikiProject Sexology and sexuality. Given the small number of templates, I'd do them manually. Happy to help/review what you did ~ Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:13, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis courtesy ping :) ~ Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:13, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Improving accessibility of WikiProjects

Various WikiProjects I am involved with have markup that are Desktop centric/not mobile accessible, for example nesting sections inside other HTML containers. Are there accessibility guidelines/lists of WikiProjects that either have exemplary markup/or could benefit from retouching? I'd be happy to join a temporary taskforce to clean up active WikiProjects, particularly the talk page which need to easier to edit regularly. Two examples of WikiProjects I tried to clean up can be seen in Wikipedia:WikiProject Sexology and sexuality and Wikipedia:WikiProject Organized Labour. Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:26, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

@Shushugah, you might look at Wikipedia:WikiProject X. I believe that having a responsive layout was one of @Harej's goals. Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine uses a verison of it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Revival of Wikipedia:WikiProject Painting

Hello, I have a question. May I revive that WikiProject? I want to use it for real paintings made out of paint, such as Starry Night for example. I also want to use it for specific types of painting, like street painting or graffiti. CyclonicStormYutu (talk) 14:46, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@CyclonicStormYutu: As far as I know, I think that any editor is free to restart a WikiProject at any time. my own suggestion would be that you go to a related larger wikiproject, and get their input on this; specifically I am thinking of WikiProject Arts as the most obvious place to ask your question.

other editors here may or may not disagree with my suggestions above; so I welcome anyone else's comments on this, of course. ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 15:19, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@CyclonicStormYutu: I would suggest first reaching out to WikiProject Visual arts before reviving Wikipedia:WikiProject Painting. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:36, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

It will sound like a minor point, but if you change the status of a WikiProject and you are the only active participant, please change it from "inactive" to "semi-active". Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:39, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

@CyclonicStormYutu, you may find some useful information at WP:REVIVE. I will recommend that you post an invitation to the Wikipedia:Talk page stalkers at User talk:Iridescent, as several friends there are interested in paintings, and some of them may be willing to keep the WikiProject's pages on their watchlist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:48, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Dealing with inactive taskforces/workgroups

Hi all, please see {{WikiProject Religion}} with my solution to have project banners handle inactive subprojects that are "nested" within higher level active projects. My plan would be to take this same approach with banners that have many more inactive subprojects, such as {{WikiProject Television}} and {{WikiProject United States}}. Comments/suggestions welcome. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:10, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

this idea might be helpful, in a number of possible permutations, at WP:History WikiProject. ---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 20:14, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

@UnitedStatesian, this amounts to merging WikiProjects, and that means you have to go through the whole process of asking the "inactive" group if they would like to do that.

Also, from a glance at their talk page, Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion looks borderline inactive to me. Why would you try to merge one inactive group into another inactive group? Remember, the point is not to categorize subjects. A WikiProject is the people, not the articles. If there's no people, there's no WikiProject, no matter what the page says. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:46, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

I disagree that this amounts to a merger. And I would only make this particular type of template change when the "parent" is marked as active or semi-active. At this point I'll leave it to others to determine whether the active status of Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion is warranted. UnitedStatesian (talk) 22:05, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

This amounts to a merger because you're taking away stuff that was previously handled by a group of editors and putting it under the ægis of another group. If the first group (or some of them) come back, we can predict that they are likely to be angry that some high-handed editor decided to unilaterally take their template away, without even having the basic courtesy to ask them. We've seen this kind of drama in the past, and we don't need more of it. Therefore the process involves posting a message at the WikiProject, waiting a month, and respecting whatever choices they make about your friendly invitation to be part of a larger group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:52, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject edit counter

Hey y'all! Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask, but: Is there an edit counter that will sort a Wikipedian's edits by WikiProjects? Hopefully, that makes sense. Let me know if it's as clear as mud.--Gen. Quon (Talk) 14:01, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Legal characters in project names

Hi. Is there a list somewhere of what characters are legal in project names? I need one character that is invalid, hopefully comma or semicolon, for a template I'm writing. Thanks! (please  mention me on reply; thanks!) Mathglot (talk) 23:12, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

List of Hindu comparative religionists and List of Muslim comparative religionists - could be seen as meaning zealots

One of the main meanings of "religionist" is zealot, and in any case I'm not sure that any other meaning of the word would be appropriate. These people appear to be theologians, although I haven't checked them all. Doug Weller talk 12:56, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

I've been bold and made the change, if anyone doesn't like it, let me know. The articles creator is blocked for copyvio. Doug Weller talk 13:07, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Option in twinkle to "alert" related WikiProjects when starting an Afd

When I started Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shakespeare knot, I marked it relevant to authors, history and England. It's something, but not that close. Obviously I can WP:APPNOTE at WikiProjects like Knots, Shakespeare and Heraldry and vexillology if I want to. But what if this was an option in twinkle? Say it produces an automated message in the line of "The article X, which may be of interest to members of this WikiProject, has been suggested for deletion. Your input is welcome."

Opinions? Or does this exist, without me knowing it? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:31, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

I think most active WikiProjects will already have article alerts set up, and most active editors will be watching deletion sorting lists in their areas of interest. Automated talk page notifications on top of that seems unnecessary to me, but if it does happen, it should definitely be opt-in: otherwise projects like WP:WPBIO would be completely overwhelmed. – Joe (talk) 15:59, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, yes. Pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Article alerts exists. The talkpage has more views, though.[5][6], at least in this example. On "most active editors will be watching deletion sorting lists in their areas of interest", I have no idea how right that is. I know I don't. While WikiProjects are "backroom", I think they're probably easier to find than article alerts and deletion lists. But optional, absolutely. My understanding is that in general more afd-participants are wanted. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:00, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Adding WikiProjects tags

Hi, is there any userscipt or something like that to add WikiProject tags to an article's talk page? I'm interested in adding WikiProject tags to articles but I've to do it manually. Eevee01^(talk) 12:06, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes - User:Evad37/rater. – SD0001 (talk) 14:39, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject sports

Hello all, I have been editing on wikipedia for about a month now and am working in and around the sports project articles. The assessment criteria is really useful for quality and priority setting but the sports project doesn't have categories for importance unlike other projects I seem to be crossing over to sometimes. I have tried making some category pages to get things working but would appreciate some guidance to make sure things are done correctly. I have been trying to keep track of the pages in my user page but the list is far to long now for it to actually be useful so any help would be greatly appreciated. DannyHatcher (talk) 01:33, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

"List of Wikiprojects" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect List of Wikiprojects. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 December 20#List of Wikiprojects until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. (t · c) buidhe 02:35, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Assistance Required Gathering Sources for List of indigenous peoples

Please see the discussion at Talk:List of indigenous peoples regarding the absence hundreds of sources in this article. If possible, contribute to discussion and provide input.

List of indigenous peoples is a massive list of which the majority of entries are are without citation. The article is in need of a team of editors to procedurally review each entry and identify reliable sources--or lack thereof.

There is also an ongoing discussion regarding the terms of inclusion in this list, which you are welcome to get involved in.

01:14, 30 December 2021 (UTC), KaerbaqianRen^💬

MfD nomination of Wikipedia:WikiProject Republika Srpska (2nd nomination)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Republika Srpska (2nd nomination), a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Republika Srpska (2nd nomination) and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:WikiProject Republika Srpska (2nd nomination) during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. ౪ Santa ౪^99° 12:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Request

Hi, I am looking to make WP:Wikiproject Military Policies, I want some experienced editors to help me, thanks! Yodas henchman (talk) 19:36, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Please check my sandbox if it is good. Yodas henchman (talk) 22:13, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

@Yodas henchman, could this be part of WP:MILHIST? Either way, you could ask them for help. Enterprisey (talk!) 22:25, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the help! Yodas henchman (talk) 00:36, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Category:Religion-related WikiProjects, Category:Christianity WikiProjects, Category:Jewish-related WikiProjects

FYI Category:Religion-related WikiProjects (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), Category:Christianity WikiProjects (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), Category:Jewish-related WikiProjects (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been proposed to be eliminated at CfD -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 05:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

WikiProjects incompetence of fatal errors in MediaWiki format.

North Macedonia page is vandalized and the 8/57 of article guideline "article citation" states the the link is incorrect. Please resolve this issue? 31.5.13.207 (talk) 22:14, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

The issue in the format has been found and the error has been resolved. Upseguest (talk) 22:17, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Manager}}

FYI, Template:WikiProject Manager (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 04:38, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Capitalization in Project name

Let me point out Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Effective Altruism#Capitalization in Project name. —Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 01:02, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

{{Coordinator}}

FYI, Template:Coordinator (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 06:29, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello from WP:FOSS!

I'm GavriilaDmitriev and I see my roots in WP:FOSS. One out of my current tasks is to take care for our TaskForce and recruiting new member. Luckily I didn't had to revive it although many WikiProjects in our environment are already inactive. I'm writing here to check the current situation of WP:COUNCIL and if other member from the IT related WikiProjects and TaskForces are active here.

• I would love to get in contact with the current participants of WP:COUNCIL

Most of places I explore seem abandoned and most of the seeming activity is done by bots. GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 04:08, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

{{WPJ1}}, {{WPJ2}}, {{WPJ3}}

FYI, template:WPJ1/template:WPJ2/template:WPJ3 have been nominated for deletion -- these are generalized wikiproject link templates -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 04:21, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

{{Convert to use WPBannerMeta}}

FYI. Template:Convert to use WPBannerMeta (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 05:45, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Inactive projects in the WikiProject directories

I'm currently very active in looking around and tidying up the environment of our WP:FOSS. I updated (basically emptied) some member lists and updated projects activity status. Please check the current status here (which I also did update):

• Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory/Science#Computing

My issue is that a lot of structures doesn't fit and represent reality anymore. In the case of the aforementioned Directory/Science#Computing roughly 6 of the 40 entries can be considered active. 3 of them are semi-active which cuts the list of active entries down to 3.

Result is that the list is basically misleading and more historical than a representation of reality. It took me some time to understand the color coding and the internal logic and I can ensure that passing visitors of those pages won't get the right impression about it's content.

 Needs discussion How to handle Directory/Science#Computing?

Idea: We could move the inactive parts into Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Inactive_projects and then remove most of it's content from the main list

GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 03:51, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Update: I found out about WikiProject Directory/Computing_WikiProjects and see the same issue there. I suggest a permanent separation which automatically hides inactive/defunct WikiProjects since 7 out of 29 show any activity. This can be done with either splitting it between active/not active view or set the inactive separated and automatically hidden as we often do it with former participant lists.

I am unaware if it looks similar in different spaces. But this is an issue in Computing that every list is cluttered with dead and inactive WikiProjects. GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 09:02, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@GavriilaDmitriev I think it would go a long way towards fixing this if the default order is changed. WP:WikiProject Directory should be sorted by "participants" by default instead of alphabetical, and similarly all sections of WP:WikiProject Council/Directory should be sorted by "active" status (also each set of taskforces) instead of the current situation where some of them are sorted by active status, others alphabetically.

Indeed, the colour-coding is not obvious for taskforces - perhaps, in the template for a taskforce entry, the taskforce name, which currently blocks 4 columns, could be reduced to 3 columns freeing up the "active" column where the active status could be explicitly noted.

I think it's useful that dead wikiprojects are listed; some of their pages could still be of use, and someone who wants to start a wikiproject might find a dead one and decide to revive that one instead, leading to less duplicated effort. I think hiding them by default or moving them elsewhere is not necessary if the two changes I described are made.

I'm not sure how often these directories are visited or used - I estimate not much, so this will likely not be prioritised. Changing the order on WP:WikiProject Council/Directory is tedious work, doing so for WP:WikiProject Directory means a change in the code of Reports bot (for both, I think moving/hiding inactive ones would be as or more difficult); the second change I described is just editing some templates, I should be able to do that relatively easily if others approve. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 16:18, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

PS: I've changed the heading from "Updated the entries of IT-related WikiProjects" to "Inactive projects in the WikiProject directories", because what you describe goes beyond just IT-related projects. I hope you don't mind.

Thank you @PJvanMill for your suggestion and changing of the title! I appreciate your initiative and you are right that it reflects the shift of topic better.

I understand there are different approaches to handle the visibility of WikiProjects and some take more effort and some less. And that some of those changes aren't considered as important to the general community to tackle it in the near future.

 Note: My experience as a newbie

While there are plenty of WikiProjects I am interested in there is just so much of me. And I had several times the experience now that I thought "Oh great, I want to participate there!" just to be immediate disappointed that it's dead for several years. This is relevant for new users. We struggle already a lot to see what actually applies to our questions just to see that more than half of the content we find is either dead or severely outdated. So I strongly disagree on keeping something because there could be someone more interested in the future because that is a luxury problem we can handle if we have a contributor influx. But currently I see the opposite happening since several years. I support keeping the WikiProjects in it's existence (means not deleting themselves) because they have valuable boards and information although often outdated. But if someone want to engage in a specific field that user will find it's precursor sooner or later. But the average user is rather looking for connection with other Wikipedians they can ask as in the Teahouse.

 Disagree on the notion that directories should show dead WikiProjects since they might be populated in the future

Idea: Hiding dead WikiProjects by default to show newcomer easily where people are active — Preceding unsigned comment added by GavriilaDmitriev (talk • contribs) 16:42, 2022 February 26 (UTC)

@GavriilaDmitriev, I don't see much of a difference in usefulness between (1) it's obvious which ones are active and which ones not, and the inactive ones are all sorted at the bottom and (2) the inactive ones are hidden by default. Meanwhile, I do see a difference in how difficult they are to achieve - for (1) it's clear how to do it, for (2) not so much, and I am almost certain that (2) would be quite a lot harder to achieve than (1). That is why I am arguing for option (1). Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 14:04, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Need help creating requests archive

Hi! I'm working on improving WP:FINANCE. We have various request backlogs and I wish to implement a backlog system similar to the one used by WP:ANRFC where only resolved requests are archived. How may I do so? Wikipedia:WikiProject Finance & Investment/Requests is one page where this would be most beneficial. Thanks! A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 12:50, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

@A. C. Santacruz: If you want the archiving to be done automatically by a bot, I think this would require each request to be in its own little section like at ANRFC. At WP:Cleanup we do the archiving manually. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 14:22, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Protection of the page and proof of "persistent vandalism"

Hello @Deepfriedokra and thank you for caring. And I believe you have the best intentions.

I saw the chance that you protected WP:COUNCIL after an IP blanked the page. While this is vandalism I don't see your quoted "persistent vandalism". I see that there are barely edits of the council page anyway (8 edits in this year, over the half of them related to this vandalism issue here). I don't appreciate that Wikipedia becomes increasingly protected so only senior members are able to edit Wikipedia. And in the case of WP:COUNCIL I see the justification as blatantly wrong. Did any public discussion happen prior to this action? Again I believe your best intentions. But I argue that your instantiated protection did more harm than it helped.

I request hereby that you remove the protection.

GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 04:02, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

@GavriilaDmitriev: Thank you for helping build Wikipedia. Semi-protection was requested at WP:RFPP, of course. Why else would I have have protected it? Please feel free to request unprotection at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection/Decrease. Please link to this discussion. All 17 of the most recent IP edits to the page going back two years have been reverted as vandalism. Though of low frequency, such vandalism (over two years) was persistent. Any autoconfirmed user can edit the page. And as the only IP edits were vandalism, I cannot agree that stopping the vandalism was harmful in any way. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 06:27, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

@Deepfriedokra Thank you for your elaboration.

What percentage of users of en.wikipedia are autoconfirmed? Am I?

Can you confirm that I, as active participant of the council, am not able to do edits anymore? That I have to go the way to request via others to make changes on my behalf?

Stopping vandalism itself is a good thing. But you exclude most participants of wikipedia with this edit.

Also the request at WP:RFPP was with only two votes. Looking at the activity there it was basically your lone decision through a pseudo-democratic process.

Excuse my lack of friendly words here but wikipedia becomes more and more elitist and less a place for non-admins. This is a good example of that trend. Of course that is hard to see as #484 on the Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits

GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 16:36, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

HAve you been editing more then four days with tn edits? If so, you are autoconfirmed. Did you not even try to edit th page/ You should. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:29, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

WP:Rfpp is not a vote. If you look closely, you will see requests are made and then answered appropriately. Admins make the determination. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:31, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

There are about 500-1000 admins. There are six million users or so. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:32, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Actually, this page shows 43,000,000 users and 1049 admins. So I think it's fair to say there are many more non admoins than admins. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 18:00, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

@GavriilaDmitriev: Please see above replies. Please feel free to request decrease in protection at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection/Decrease. Thanks. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:35, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for caring @Deepfriedokra. I admit I was wrong on my assumption.

I confused autoconfirmation (as you mentioned 4 days old account and have made at least 10 edits) and extended confirmation (which is a pretty high bar with 500 edits). I assumed 60,585 extended confirmed user with the 43 million autoconfirmed.

I also correct that Wikipedia rarely votes on something but that admins often make the decisions - which is the issue I was trying to address. This is still a problem and a big reason why a lot of people are put off (even knowing and following the rules) on Wikipedia.

Excuse my temperamental reaction towards you. I appreciate the time you took with your explanation.

GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 06:19, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

@GavriilaDmitriev: Just as a parting afterthought, I stood for adminship at a time before admins were regarded (by too many, not myself) as some sort of exalted potentates. We have three extra buttons that allow us to clean up-- like janitors we sweep (or mop). If there are any users who are to be regarded as "elite," it's those with Featured articles and/or Good articles. Not that the two groups are mutually exclusive. But as a "legacy admin," I am a janitor. We/I serve at the discretion of the Community. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 10:27, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

The process for creating a project page

Hello there, I am planning to create a project page for a Network at the University of St Andrews. Our main focus is to raise awareness about the Wikimedia projects, run Edit-a-thons and training events across the University of St Andrews and beyond. We hope that the project page will develop into something like this, which is created by our colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. We already have interested Wikipedians at our University, and I would appreciate some guidance on how to proceed with creating the page. For example, I am not sure in our case whether to propose the project page or start it directly. Many thanks Abd Alsattar Ardati (talk) 10:11, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

Review Request Help

Can someone review the page Draft:Spick_Media_Network ? This draft has been pending for more than 48 days. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RajendranMCV (talk • contribs) 06:06, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Review Request

Can someone review the page Draft:Nalinthip Sakulongumpai. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Publiconline123 (talk • contribs) 05:26, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Review Request Draft Page

Hello, can someone please review Draft:Don Samuels? It has been waiting for about 3 months, and has already had citation bot check run. Thank you so much! Runesandarrows — Preceding undated comment added 15:01, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography is probably a more appropriate venue for this request. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:06, 20 July 2022 (UTC)

Review Request Draft Page

Please someone review the Draft page Draft:Lubna Marium this is my first artical. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ayatul nish (talk • contribs) 04:56, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Template:Class update

I'm working towards upgrading {{class}} to use Lua and a JSON definition file. Not least because this affects ~17% of all pages, I would appreciate input and/or review at Template talk:Class#Move to Lua/JSON version. Please respond there, or ping me if you respond here. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 17:36, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

New navbox set up

Hi everyone. this is your friendly neigborhood Coordinator for WikiProject History. I have made a new type of navbox for history topics, focusing upon one period in Europe's history. what do you think of this? feel free to comment, offer suggestions, etc. thanks!!!

{{Early Modern Europe|state=expanded}}

---Sm8900 (talk) 🌍 16:48, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Could also include History of European Jews in the Middle Ages, Haskalah, Islamic world contributions to Medieval Europe, and maybe some other links to topics about the history of Europe that centre non-Christians? MadameOctavian (talk) 07:28, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

those are good ideas. thanks!! by the way, would you like to be a Coordinator at WikiProject History? We can use input from some knowledgeable and experienced editors, on many areas. thanks!! Sm8900 (talk) 01:33, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

RfC re: WikiProject Public Art

Unresolved

I've started an RfC re: whether or not WikiProject Public Art should be merged into WikiProject Visual arts:

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Public Art

If editors decide a merge is appropriate, I hope someone knows how to assist with converting a WikiProject into a task force appropriately.

Thanks, ---Another Believer _(Talk) 14:15, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

The RfC at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Public Art has closed. I'd say there's generally support to convert WikiProject Public art into a task force of WikiProject Visual arts. Does someone know how to do this, or is there somewhere I can submit a request? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 05:16, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

@Another Believer, have you looked at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:47, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Add warnings to pages that contain violent or disturbing images

Many pages, such as those contain information on diseases or war have disturbing content with no warning or filter. Warnings about potentially disturbing images should be added to pages containing content such as those showing burns or lesions. Some pages on war and conflict contain images of corpses which may also be disturbing to viewers. 117.20.68.52 (talk) 11:27, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Content disclaimer, linked from the bottom of every page through the Disclaimers link. Imzadi 1979 → 15:28, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Per WP:NOTCENSORED you'll likely have trouble getting editors to support a general rule on disturbing content warnings (and coming up with a global line for what is "disturbing" would be impossible). However if you have particular articles in mind where you think unnecessarily graphic images distract from the article's purpose and make it more challenging for a reader to understand, feel free to post at those talk pages or at the relevant WikiProjects (e.g. for pages on burns and lesions consider WT:MED) and folks may be willing to find alternative images -- basically per WP:ASTONISH. Ajpolino (talk) 16:30, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

The usual categories for complaints are sex/nudity, violence, disgusting, and sacred (Depictions of Muhammad is the obvious example, but some indigenous groups also object to photos of certain places or objects). Complaints about medical content tend to be in the "disgusting" category. We might not be able to agree on a standard like "blood makes some people queasy", but I'd bet that anyone who edits that area much could give you a "top 10" list pretty easily. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Unreferenced Articles project collaboration

Hi all! The Unreferenced Articles project is looking to make connections with editors and projects who would be interested in assisting in clearing out the backlog (dating back to January 2007!) of unreferenced articles. Currently there are over 142,000 - I guarantee there is something that touches every WikiProject in some way. WP:URA has been semi-active for some time now but we are getting more activity and are now trying to raise awareness of our goals and aims to keep the momentum going. I was wondering if any WikiProject coordinators would be interested in discussing collaborations, i.e. teaming up with WikiProject:Malaysia to cite a number of highway articles, Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports for players and tournament results, etc. 142,000+ articles is too much for one fledgling project to handle but as more projects get involved, I'm sure the number will drop rapidly. I have reached out to the Signpost WikiProjects desk to put a spotlight on the project and we are thinking of holding a community drive as well. If anyone is interested in participating, please sign up and use 'Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles; you can help!' as the edit summary to boost awareness among other editors. We look forward to working with you! Kazamzam (talk) 16:09, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Collectively, we can all contribute to make it happen. Raskoby947 (talk) 08:58, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Task force assessment

Is there a way to allow a task force to set a different priority for an article than the parent project has? For example, the new lichen task force would like to rate some articles as being more important for the task force than would be appropriate for WP:FUNGI overall. (This is primarily to keep us focused initially on the most important articles to bring up to GA/FA standards.) MeegsC (talk) 10:18, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

@MeegsC: Yes, it is very much possible, see the code at Special:Diff/1101799526. It categorised as low-importance for WP Fungi, but high-importance for the lichen task force. In cases where lichen-importance= is not set, it will default to the importance rating of WP Fungi. However, a template code change may be made at {{WikiProject Fungi}}, so that, if lichen-importance= is not set, it will go to Category:Unknown-importance lichen task force articles or something like that, which will ease future rating. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:57, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Great! Thanks. MeegsC (talk) 05:13, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Proposed merger of WikiProject Dutch municipalities into WikiProject Netherlands as a task force

Hello everyone, it has been proposed that Wikipedia:WikiProject Dutch municipalities be merged into Wikipedia:WikiProject Netherlands as a task force, due to inactivity. The relevant discussion may be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Dutch municipalities#Proposed merger into WikiProject Netherlands as a task force and interested editors may participate in that discussion. Thank you! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 22:02, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Note: The merger had consensus and all related janitorial tasks completed. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 10:48, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

District or Council UK

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography regarding articles on district or council. Please come along to post your comments. Davidstewartharvey (talk) 03:45, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

RFC on District names and Councils

Please find an RFC for District names and councils on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography. Please join the discussion.Davidstewartharvey (talk) 08:34, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Inactivity of the multimodal project wiki

Hello, I came to activate this project considering that the wiki of the multimodal project was disabled, how is it? Does it require permission? AHEJJWILEMAMALIDGED (talk) 09:14, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Hi @AHEJJWILEMAMALIDGED: Sorry, we're unable to understand you. Can you please be a bit clearer? Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 10:44, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

The wiki is a multi-faceted multi-year project that is inactive If this project wiki is disabled, there may not be much progress in polygons, geometric volumes, etc That's why I said to let me start this wiki project. AHEJJWILEMAMALIDGED (talk) 08:37, 23 August 2022 (UTC) please reply AHEJJWILEMAMALIDGED (talk) 08:37, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

It is probably better to try and seek help within an existing and active Wikiproject, unless you find other users who agree a more specific page will be valuable. CMD (talk) 08:43, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

New WikiProject

I'm not sure if anyone watches this talk page but I just came across a new WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject Russian invasion of Ukraine and thought I'd tell some editor who cares about WikiProjects. Looks like a one editor WikiProject. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:43, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Liz. Left a message at the project talk page. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 06:16, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Smartphones

Sock of User:TzarN64. Magnatyrannus (talk | contribs) 23:56, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
A new discussion about a new WikiProject related to WikiProject Council is currently being discussed. Share your thoughts here. SMBMovieFan (talk) 02:52, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

New WikiProject Proposal!

Hello wikipedians, i am SMBMovieFan. i just proposed a new WikiProject called WikiProject Android. The wikiproject will be about improving the coverage of the operating system Android. There is a ton of articles to improve, and i believe this wikiproject will help improve the articles related to Android. Interested? Vote for your support here. SMBMovieFan (talk) 10:30, 16 October 2022 (UTC) (Reposted from the TeaHouse.)

A WikiProject shouldn’t be set up, unless you can demonstrate that an existing WikiProject is already super active, which Google isn’t. The more WikiProjects you have, the bigger the risk of spreading your editors apart. Additionally, I would recommend you directly improve the articles you’re interested first; and develop relations with other like-minded editors on same articles. You’ll have more luck finding other contributors on an existing or new WikiProject that way. Best of luck and happy editing! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:04, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. However i believe this WikiProject will be active. But i appreciate your opinions. SMBMovieFan (talk) 15:13, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

This editor has been blocked as a sock. I don't think the page was ever created, but if it was, it should probably be sent to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Working with other people

If you are watching this page, you are probably more interested in how to get groups of people to work together than the average editor. I ran across this tool on cultural differences: https://hbr.org/2014/08/whats-your-cultural-profile and I thought it might interest some of you. You can find out how you compare (e.g., for the amount of direct criticism that feels appropriate) compared to the country of your choice.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:21, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Very interesting. ...thank you. Moxy- 05:14, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

New WikiProject needs help with assessments

Hello there, I recently created Wikipedia:WikiProject Protista and I'm having a hard time understanding what it is that I need to do in order to make the Assessment thing work. I created the corresponding categories of "Protista articles by importance" and "quality", and I entered the name "Protista" in the "WP 1.0 bot"'s website, but nothing seems to have changed, almost as if the bot doesn't yet recognize Protista as a project. Any help is highly appreciated. ☽ Snoteleks ☾ 08:18, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

@Snoteleks, is it still broken? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing No, it got fixed shortly after I asked for help in another talk page! It is working perfectly fine now. Thanks for answering anyway though. ☽ Snoteleks ☾ 09:53, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Teahouse question needs feedback

Please see WP:Tea house#Class not showing up on wikiproject template. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:07, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Responded at WP:TEAHOUSE. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:24, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Why do we destroy the assessment infrastructure for inactive projects?

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index#Why_do_we_destroy_the_assessment_infrastructure_for_inactive_projects?. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:06, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Improper_handling_of_assessment_for_inactive_WikiProjects _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:46, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

feedback

please have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Silly_Mountain_(Arizona) --Team5DTMaddalena (talk) 14:10, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

Proposing WikiProject New Zealand law

I'm searching for people interested in setting up a New Zealand law WikiProject, I've already contacted editors on WP:LAW and WP:NZ. Just seeing if I'll be able to poach anyone who may be interested from here. If you're interested, please respond at the main proposal on the NZ WikiProject page. Thanks all! Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 12:59, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

@Carolina2k22, I doubt that you'll find enough people to make it worth the hassle of setting up a whole WikiProject for that. I suggest that you keep seeking editors, but just hang out at WP:NZ. (You'll know that it's time to make a separate space when the old timers repeatedly complain that all these law folks are taking up too much space.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:47, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I've come to that conclusion now after a bit of discussion on there. Though, it's been encouraged to sort out a task force under the NZ project so I think that's likely a good idea. I'll definitely keep the seeking of editors open. Thank you! Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 23:29, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

All the best @Carolina2k22 and if you need any assistance regarding the creation of task force, let me know. Wonder if you remember me, but you made me an userbox when I was just starting out on Wikipedia. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 09:10, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, I appreciate it! Feel free to join in on WT:NZ if you're keen at all to participate (or want to stalk). It's looking like we've got a rough plan sorted to start and the choice opted for is to create a task force.

When your name came up it did definitely ring a bell. Happy to see you're still around! (I certainly had a bit of a hiatus myself for a while until recently). Carolina2k22 • (talk) • (edits) 09:19, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Ratings

Please see User talk: LlywelynII#Top-importance articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:48, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

Reverted/removed ratings from all assessed articles in the Oct-Dec period. I noticed that you reverted a few ones, and some other editors reverted the ones on the articles they were interested in: Talk: Francolino, Talk: Uncle from Another World, Talk: Chariomerus. Wish you a belated Happy New Year! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 11:12, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikiproject Autonomous Zones

Hi - this discussion proposed the creation of Wikipedia:WikiProject Autonomous Zones. The proposal received support from the proposer, a CU-confirmed sock of the proposer, and a third editor; and it received opposition from two editors. The proposer went on to create the Wikiproject before the discussion was closed; the proposer and their socks are now blocked, and the Wikiproject has seen no edits of any kind since their block. From what I gather, this project never had the requisite amount of support to go forward, it was created out of process, and it is now moribund. Is there a process by which it can be closed down - do I simply nominate the project page for XfD? Best Girth Summit _(blether) 18:52, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

@Girth Summit: There are no deletion processes for WikiProjects, so I guess MfD would be the way to go. This project shouldn't have been created in the first place when consensus didn't quite exist. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 09:59, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Autonomous Zones. Girth Summit _(blether) 13:16, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Proposalsubst}}

FYI, Template:WikiProject Proposalsubst (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been proposed to be deleted at TfD. This is a preload template used to place a skeleton of a proposal onto a new WikiProject proposal page. -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 21:08, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

note re active item

reactivating the WikiProject below. marked as semi-active for now.

• Link: Wikipedia:WikiProject Navigation templates

thanks. Sm8900 (talk) 16:27, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles

This WikiProject has been rewamped and revived, and I'd like to know your opinions about the redesign. The WikiProject's philosophy is a bit radical compared to most other WikiProject, which ultimately aims to make the place less vulnerable to fiefdom and more open for bystanders. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:22, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

@CactiStaccingCrane, this seems like a good idea. do you have banner templates set up for this wikiproject, which usrs might be able to add individual articles' talk pages, if they wish? thanks. Sm8900 (talk) 17:00, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

There is a formal proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments to allow class ratings to be placed into the banner shell, and to be hidden inside the individual project banners (unless they choose to opt-out). Please come along and comment! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:21, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments. This proposes support for quality assessment at the article level, recorded in {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and inherited by the wikiproject banners. However, wikiprojects that prefer to use custom approaches to quality assessment can continue to do so. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:30, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

@Aymatth2, thanks for your great efforts. this item has now been posted on the tab for "Technical" topics at Village Pump, since the discussion for the original proposal has been closed. Sm8900 (talk) 20:08, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Wiki-projects revival

I recently joined the wiki-project Prussia which is marked as inactive, in a bid to revive the project started to wright new articles and asked all the 7 members if they wanted to help me revive the project, none of them answered. Is it ok now for me to take charge and create task forces, recruit new members, and become the leader. I didn't want to read all the policies and go through the bureaucracy so I'm asking here Crainsaw (talk) 15:57, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Crainsaw: If no one else is interested, feel free to organise things in a way you want to. [I don't think that WP Prussia has a leader position though]. In any case, since you are a relatively new editor, I'd suggest you to gain experience in spaces with active editors who will help you navigate the rules and guidelines and best practices of Wikipedia, which are applicable sitewide. And more importantly, keep your ears open to any suggestion/feedback/criticism/appreciation you receive for your work, which will only help you be better every passing edit. Thanks and happy editing! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 18:02, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips!! Crainsaw (talk) 18:04, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Looking for collaboration in article "David Gonzalez"

".Hi, I wrote this article by a multi-faceted New York artist that is now in draft format: Draft:David Gonzalez (multi-disciplinary artist)

The article is part of Wikiproject arts, WikiProject Children's literature, and WikiProject Biographies.

I respectfully ask if anyone can help me in making the wording neutral.  The most important reference is an article from the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/12/movies/orpheus-as-a-charmer-with-a-sax.html can also be viewed here:                  Thank you very much   Miskito89 (talk) 15:38, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

@Miskito89: I'm afraid you are unlikely to get much help from this page. You may try asking at a more centralised location such as WP:Village pump (miscellaneous). —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 12:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Question and Suggestion

Greetings! I'm pretty new, joined some WikiProjects, & wanted to know how projects assess articles. I just read up WP:PROJGUIDE and the 2013 FAQ, & want to make sure the below is an accurate summary.

Near as I can tell, most projects invite any project member to add & assess articles of interest. To use a Random example, State Road 33 (Serbia) is currently only within purview of WikiProject Highways as Stub/Mid. However A1 motorway (Serbia) which it links to is within both Highways and WikiProject Serbia as Start/Mid for both projects. I'm not a member of the Serbia project, but if I was, in accordance w/ their guidance, I could at least add SR33 as Unassessed/Unassessed, and perhaps boldly give it Stub/Mid, and let other editors reassess as needed.

After all that, question is: Do I have that right?

Suggestion: It may be worthwhile to convince projects to always link WP:PROJSCOPE on their assessment pages/sections. I nearly posted this as a Teahouse question, partly because I'm new, but also because PROJGUIDE was somewhat unintuitive to find, & even once found starts w/ project creation so I almost made the mistake of navigating away instead of scrolling down. I don't think it's bad to have all the guidance on 1 page, but at first glance, it seemed too high echelon advice when I just wanted to know how to gnome around relative to an existing project.

Just food for thought, looking forward to helping my projects. Thanks! KatPro (mrow?) 03:11, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

@KatProsodi, to save everyone time, we try to rate |quality= for all WikiProjects at the same time. A stub's a stub for everyone, and with five sentences (91 words) of prose, the article you give as an example probably counts as a stub (although reasonable people might disagree, given the large table, and that's okay, too).

If you are familiar with the subject area, or you have a decent guess about how the other group rates pages for importance (e.g., by reading their documentation [if any] or by seeing how they rated similar articles), then most groups consider it helpful if you assign at least "obvious" |importance= ratings.

If you think you would enjoy this kind of work, I suggest installing User:Evad37/rater (or a similar script). Then go to Category:Unassessed NATO articles or any similar category for an area that interests you, and assess as much as you can. If you start with the really obvious ones, you'll get the hang of it before long. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:11, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Please check the importance ratings for your favorite WikiProjects

I have seen an editor marking articles as "top importance" for all WikiProjects. This kind of mistake happens occasionally, and if your group hasn't reviewed the list of articles rated as "top" for a while, this might be a good time to see what else might have ended up there. (Check the subcategories of Category:Top-importance articles to find your group, or click the "Top" link in the bot-generated statistics tables.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:01, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Is that editor back at it again, or is it a genuine mistake? —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 17:05, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

That editor appears to have taken our advice on board, and AFAICT has not made the same type of edit since. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:35, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia YouTube

Apologies for grammar I'm using voice to text. I am proposing somehow even if I can assist if needed that Wikipedia start a YouTube channel I for one am a firm believer that this is needed in the aspect of I am a person that prefers to read things and having to watch a video is very irritating because for me it slows me down and I can't quickly go through something that is only on a video because I still have to sit there through a 10 minute video that feels like 3 hours when I could have just skimmed an article for a couple of minutes and gotten my answer. I am 34 years old and my eyes are failing me faster than I would like them to so sitting there and reading for a long periods of time I can't do without glasses and that gets painful as well so my thing is how can we incorporate everything that we already have on Wikipedia all of this amazing and useful information be put into a video that everybody can access and for those that cannot necessarily read or like me have a hard time reading can watch this and also see the words but hear them and be able to learn the same thing without having to read super tiny things that you can't always zoom in on.

I just think it could be a useful thing, I prefer fact checking Wikipedia than many other places because validity is a real issue. As stated, id love to help if possible or even if needed, I feel this could change way we are able to educate ourselves. 24.180.70.227 (talk) 18:40, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

24.180.70.227, this may not directly answer your proposal, but there is WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. — Qwerfjkltalk 19:40, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Articles without Wikiprojects

I've created a Quarry query here that scans for Wikipedia articles that are missing talk pages, and thus also not assigned to any WikiProject. There are currently 79,658 articles in this state.

Would anyone be interested in creating a task tracker, bot, or ML model to help create talk pages for these articles with relevant WikProject assignments? — The Anome (talk) 13:31, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much, it will be very helpful for us to assign WikiProjects and assessment ratings to such articles. However, I think we should wait until the implementation of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 198#Project-independent quality assessments is completed. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 19:21, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I have another, more elaborate query at https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/71860# that scans for articles which have talk pages but are not assigned to any Wikiproject. A recent run shows 68,804 articles in this state. Combining this with the articles without talk pages mentioned above gives a total figure of 148,462 articles in need of WikiProject tagging; roughly 2.2% of Wikipedia's total article count. — The Anome (talk) 08:28, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Would anyone be interested in my tagging all of these articles' talk pages with something like {{WikiProject unassigned}}, that would then act as a spur for other sorting processes to begin? — The Anome (talk) 13:19, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@The Anome, does this include redirects? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

No, it doesn't include redirects; both queries ([7], [8]) explicitly check for redirects and several different kinds of other false positives. — The Anome (talk) 08:10, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Another question: Could you reliably identify articles about people, and spam in Template:WikiProject Biography? I think some of the BLP warnings depend on that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: It would depend on the articles having been already added to categories, and then following the category tree. A very quick-and-dirty version would involve checking for categories matching "[^_]+_births" and "[^_]+_deaths", and perhaps requiring the absence of any categories containing ".*fictional.*" or ".*character.*" but it wouldn't be exhaustive. I might have a quick go at these. — The Anome (talk) 08:21, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Here's a quick hack at both of the above: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/71961 , https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/71962 Note that neither are perfect, with both visible false positives and undoubtedly also false negatives. However, putting both queries together, they currently find roughly 5000 people articles missing Wikiproject tags — The Anome (talk) 08:53, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not so much worried about false negatives (tagging some of them would be better than what we have now, which is tagging none of them). But the false positives problem means that we need human review.

That probably means generating the list (which you have  Done) and then finding an editor to click through all the articles and remove anything that isn't a person. I'll see if I can make a list from the first query this weekend. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! It's great to see other people interested in getting this going. I've made a few more tweaks to the queries to reduce the rate of false positives further. — The Anome (talk) 09:07, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, when you have the list do let me know. I can knock some out while taking breaks from work. — Ixtal ^{( T / C )} ⁂ Non nobis solum. 11:54, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

My first attempt eventually crashed the app I was using to turn the list of titles into wikitext links. I'm planning to try again with the shorter list soon. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

@Ixtal, please see the top of User:WhatamIdoing/Sandbox 3. This is the shorter (~1,000) list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:02, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I would join this WikiProject. It’s the kind of project where I have fun learning about new WikiProjects, checking if they’re even active, and if article is up my alley, I may even make some gnome edits here and there. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 19:30, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

I've just realised that if I build an frequency matrix for article categories vs. WikiProjects, I can then trivially propagate those frequencies up the category tree to generate relevant frequencies for higher-order categories, something which should help things generalise much more efficiently where there are only small numbers of articles associated with very specific leaf categories. This should make the results much more accurate. Oh -- and I've just realised I can also use article links for categorization as well. — The Anome (talk) 10:19, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

How about calling this project WikiProject Article sorting? If this was created, I could trivially use a bot to mark all the talk pages of un-tagged articles with {{WikiProject Article sorting}}, and let human beings start sorting this out before even thinking about how to do the auto-categorization.. — The Anome (talk) 10:21, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

One more epiphany: I can re-use some of the dump-processing infrastructure I've created for the coordinates-matching project to build this, and do the relevant graph-traversal in memory, vastly increasing processing speeds compared to submitting queries to the toolserver or Quarry. — The Anome (talk) 11:10, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Here's one query that trivially finds living people pages that have talk pages but are not tagged as being under WP:BIOGRAPHY: See https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/72401 — The Anome (talk) 16:26, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

@The Anome, @WhatamIdoing, mw:ORES/Articletopic might help with identifying which wikiprojects are relevant to articles.
I'd be interested in working on this. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:12, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

@The Anome, @WhatamIdoing, if you're interested, I've started work on this, mainly using ORES. You can see User talk:Qwerfjkl#Bot work for discussion regarding it. I would appreciate any input you could give. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:55, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I had a look and posted a couple of questions. Overall, it looks good. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:51, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

B-class articles

I don't recall the exact comments but a bot was sanctioned to effectively equalize all projects to a similar class assessment on an article. I thought this was a bad idea from the start and I "think" this may have been discontinued. A problem I have run into is articles assessed as B-class with multiple citations needed tags (as far back as 2011), weasel word tags, and various other tags that either cause the article to fail #1 and oftentimes #2 of the criterion. I realize overzealous editors might be some of the reasoning but if a bot did not have a parameter for tagged articles I could see this as a reason.

I suppose a good question would be:

• Is there a bot that can scan these articles with a parameter to exclude tagged articles and reassess them at C-class? I started manually going through various lists and did not realize the magnitude of wrongly assessed articles. As a pre-emption to any possible reverts I have been leaving talk page comments but at my age, I will run out of time before articles. I have also been using the B-class articles to review "External links" and correct these at the same time. Thanks, -- Otr500 (talk) 05:11, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree that this consensus was a bad idea. In general, there's no real reason for many WPs to exist if the community at large is going to hijack content assessment and subject it to a "one size fits all" standard. When I assess an article, I look first at completeness and sourcing and try to adhere to the criteria as best as I can. Too many assessments I've come across in recent years appear to ignore the criteria and assess the article based on how many subject headers, images and other elements of formatting puffery it contains. That situation's only going to get worse if we're expected to buy into one size fits all, because in many cases, we're dealing with someone's pet project and they have a vested interest in seeing an artificially higher rating for that article. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 09:14, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

It's always been okay for a B-class article to have the occasional {{citation needed}} or {{weasel-inline}} tags. @Otr500, what you describe above sounds a lot more like the Wikipedia:Good article criteria to me.

Although we've never officially specified specific numbers, the traditional rule of thumb for B class is that there's at least one citation per ==Level 2== section, and in recent years, more editors have attempted to raise the standard to match Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/B-Class FAQ, which says a minimum of one citation per paragraph (plus direct quotations). It is really not meant to be a stringent process, and occasional exceptions have always been tolerated, and even encouraged. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

@Otr500 you may be thinking of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 198#Project-independent quality assessments. In which case no bot has been commissioned to "equalise" ratings. A project for the future will be to assign a project-independent quality rating to all articles, but I would think that any articles with differing ratings will be subject to human editor review — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:00, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

• Thanks WhatamIdoing. I usually do not bother with a single or even a couple of tags. Sometimes I will toss a note on the talk page. Some I have reviewed are a mess and were certainly prematurely promoted. I have been bouncing around, spot-checking, articles that are in a maintenance category. Going forward I will consider that the criteria mention "any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited". I agree, however, that we don't need a "one size fits all". While it might sound like a good idea it has been rubber-stamping some articles that don't come close to meeting the B-class crieria. -- Otr500 (talk) 04:19, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

  I mostly worry about assessments that are off by two classes, e.g., labeled B-class when it's really a Start-class, and vice versa. Reasonable people could disagree about "good C-class" vs "barely B-class", but we shouldn't have obviously wrong assessments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:44, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Reply: Sorry, I have been off a few days. Just wanted to state I totally agree with you. -- Otr500 (talk) 11:10, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Proposal

Hello, I created today Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Projekt_Kateryna, but I think I missed editing the necessary template. Not sure what I should do to correct it? The proposal does not seem to be lised at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals. Thank you for any help. robertsilen (talk) 17:32, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Listing the proposal there will probably not prove very important. If you'd like to recruit more editors, then you might consider posting a {{Please see}} note at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) or a similar, higher-traffic page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:28, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you @WhatamIdoing:, I did that now. robertsilen (talk) 06:55, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

MFD of one of the WikiProject pages

Please see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Systems and participate if you have an opinion on this method of proposing to disband a WikiProject. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Content assessment § Proposal: Reclassification of Current & Future-Classes as time parameter

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Content assessment § Proposal: Reclassification of Current & Future-Classes as time parameter. There is a proposal to split "current" & "future" classes into a new parameter "time", in order to standardise article-rating across Wikipedia (per RfC), while also allowing simultaneous usage of quality criteria and time for interest projects. Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 07:28, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Proposed changes to extended quality scale

Now that 99% of projects are using the standard or extended quality scale, we should probably pay more attention to what is included in each. Suggestions:

• I think Redirect should probably be included in the extended scale because many many projects track their redirects.
• On the other hand, is Portal really needed as there are likely to be few portal pages within each project's remit? NA should be sufficient for those.

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:42, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

It's easier to add items than to remove them. If we remove the portal class, we can expect someone to complain. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:22, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Okay, fair point. Maybe I should separate these proposals. Does anyone have a problem with Redirect being included in the extended quality scale? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:06, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

The quality scales really belong to the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, so you should probably ask them. The only problems I can predict are that when the assessment statistics tables (example) include redirects, it produces a misleading total, and if they're used routinely (e.g., applied by bot), someone will eventually complain about millions of "unnecessary" talk pages being created (rather than, e.g., redirecting the talk pages). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I kind of disagree with you. Version 1.0 is a long inactive project, and since [9] the community has effectively taken control of the quality scale away from individual projects, so perhaps I should be proposing this at Wikipedia talk:Content assessment but I don't know how watched that page is. I'm not sure what the effect will be on that page, but many many projects already track redirects so I don't expect much confusion, just a bunch a new categories to be created. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:22, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

The 1.0 team depends on the ratings in a way that no other group does. It would make sense to talk to them to make sure that your proposals don't conflict with their needs. I can guess that these suggestions will be okay, but Walkerma is better informed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:56, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, @WhatamIdoing and MSGJ: - I don't think those changes would affect us much. We mainly use quality & importance assessments for putting together selections, so it doesn't matter a lot to us whether or not how redirects or portals are listed. However, I'm not the tech person, so I suggest talking with Audiodude directly, as he is the main person writing code for the Bot. BTW, we are very quiet on WP itself, but in fact Audiodude has spent hundreds of hours in the last year writing or rewriting code to improve the WP1.0 bot and WP1.0 server - so the project is just behind the scenes, not inactive. I'm actually traveling to Europe next month to see User:Kelson, the Kiwix guy, so yes, we are still active offline! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 20:21, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

• Greetings Walkerma, Kelson, and Audiodude. Replying here shows the note: "This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference", as well as your comments about the non-Wikipedia visible activity, seem to suggest the wording is not accurate. Maybe this could be changed to something more accurate. Possibly adding the names of any "behind the scene " editors that might be willing to provide assistance. Just a thought. Also, it would seem that a note on the talk page of such visits or other off-Wikipedia discussions would be beneficial as well as adding some transparency. -- Otr500 (talk) 12:02, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

 Done Just to note that Redirect has now been added to the standard extended scale. But it will only be used if the appropriate category has been created, otherwise it will continue to use NA-Class. Therefore it will not be necessary to create lots of categories. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:03, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Renaming of categories

It is time we finally got rid of the oxymoronic category names like Category:Template-Class Ukraine articles. (If it is a template then it is NOT an article!) I am planning a mass CfD at some stage and would like to get some comments on a better naming scheme. I think the format Category:XXX-Class YYY articles should be used solely for the quality of articles in topic YYY. For non-articles, we could use something like

• Category:WikiProject Ukraine template pages
• Category:WikiProject Ukraine templates

Any thoughts? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:40, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Are you prepared to re-write Template:WPBannerMeta to cope with your more complicated naming scheme? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Absolutely! I need to write that damn template in Lua anyway, so this might be the motivation I need — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:23, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I see that the second proposed category name is already used, as is Category:WikiProject Public Art templates Category:Public art task force templates, Category:WikiProject India templates among others. A new name if chosen, should ensure that existing categorisation system isn't conflicted. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 16:54, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I like the idea in principle - those category names always made me chuckle - as long as it doesn't cause a lot of headaches for other Wikipedians. If you can make a global change without it messing up assessments or lists, then it would be great. Would you be able to test it out on a couple of specific categories first, or would it be "all or nothing" on maybe a million "non-articles" in one go? If the latter, then you might want to take this discussion to a wider audience first. Thanks, though - it's long overdue, really! Walkerma (talk) 04:27, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I also support this in principle, as long as it doesn't break anything else that can't easily be fixed. -Kj cheetham (talk) 20:58, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Inactive

Should WP:HAWAII be marked as inactive? Before today there had been over a year of routine announcements and automated edits to the talk page which makes it inactive according to WP:INACTIVEWP. After I marked it as inactive Cielquiparle came along, objected (with no further reasoning), and then reverted my marking of the project as inactive with the summary "just b/c the Talk page isn't active doesn't mean the Project isn't active". When I asked for them to elaborate more they stated that their objection and me trying to understand why made the project active now. They proceeded to say I didn't realize becoming a member was so exclusive. even though the WikiProject's main page has a list of active members (which doesn't appear to have been pruned in a while) and then answered a question that had gone unanswered on the talk page for a few days, almost in an attempt to try and make the WikiProject not fit the criteria of an inactive WikiProject because I saw it as such. I'm not trying to assume bad faith here, however I really don't want to argue over something as simple as the inactivity of a WikiProject. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:34, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Over the past year, I have received help from WikiProject Hawaii members on articles related to Hawaii. (At least, I thought they were WikProject Hawaii members. I confess, I have no idea how WikiProject membership works.) Cielquiparle (talk) 19:53, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Just add your name on the membership list (if there is any) and do what you like. There are no office-like minimum work requirements. Just write articles related to that wikiproject's subject, identify issues, discuss them on the wikiproject talk page with fellow editors, etc. That's what it means to be a member of a wikiproject. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 20:03, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf, if marking a project as inactive results in someone noticing, reverting it, and answering a question on the talk page, then that is a very good thing. Congratulations! You may have inspired someone to WP:REVIVE an inactive WikiProject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:20, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Very good advice, like a wake-up call. -- Otr500 (talk) 04:23, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, yes, thats a great point. it also enables any newcomers to that specific wikiproject to feel like they are free to pitch in, if they feel inclined to do so. Sm8900 (talk) 21:55, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Johnny Depp

Would someone from COUNCIL take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Johnny Depp and Draft:Wikipedia:WikiProject Johnny Depp? It looks like someone is trying to create a new WikiProject but just doesn't know how. It seems quite odd for there to be a draft for a WikiProject in the draft namespace and being submitted for AFC review. Perhaps someone with more experience in creating WikiProjects can advise the creator on what's best way to do so. -- Marchjuly (talk) 05:18, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

@Marchjuly: The correct process will be to create a proposal for newe project at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals. Some instructions are available here Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 05:23, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for that information, but I'm not the creator of either. The draft is probably going to end being deleted per WP:G13 and the existing page in Wikipedia namespace may end up at AfD. The creator seems to be quite a new editor who's only edits so far have been to create the aforementioned two pages in addition to Category:Johnny Depp articles by importance, Template:WikiProject Johnny Depp and Category:FA-Class Johnny Depp articles and to make some edits to Cultural impact and legacy of Johnny Depp. -- Marchjuly (talk) 05:32, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah I don't think we need a WikiProject just for one actor. Suggest joining Wikipedia:WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:14, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Formal Joining

Hello I wanted to know if Wikipedia has a formal process of joining a wikiproject. I was unable to locate a join link or find an administrator to answer my question. More information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

FictiousLibrarian (talk). 03:42, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

@FictiousLibrarian: There is no formal joining process. WikiProjects are a place to collaborate with editors interested in some topic. If you are interested in any topic, you can always join its WikiProject. Some WikiProjects may have a Members/Participants list, feel free to add your name to that list if you are joining. Keep an eye on the talk page of the project you join, so that you can see what discussions are taking place among the collaborators. Best. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:02, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd say that one of the most useful things a new participant can do is to watchlist the group's page to keep track of discussions. When you see someone who needs help, try to help them. Maybe you won't be able to help with everything, but if you do your best to help with the things you can do, you'll quickly get a reputation for being a valuable participant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

User Stats for activity in projects

Is there a way to see what WikiProjects a user is most active in? For example, this tool shows my account is most active in Main space, then Talk, then Wikipedia, etc.

I can also see Wikipedia articles I've created, or files uploaded.

Is there a way I can see what projects my edited pages are part of? Do I edit topics around Music more than TV? Do I edit mostly Australian content? Etc. I think I should be able to know this based on the WikiProjects these pages are part of, but unless I look at them individually there doesn't seem to be a way to find this out as a nice chart. Jimmyjrg (talk) 14:37, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

@Jimmyjrg, I don't think we have a tool that's exactly like what you're asking for, but you might be interested in the list of articles you edit most often at https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Jimmyjrg#top-edited-pages (or see the complete list here).

Previously, a bot written by User:Harej would update pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Musicians, but it hasn't run that task for over a year. If you don't mind out-of-date information, then this search link will give you a list of the three WikiProjects that were supporting articles you edited the last time the bot ran. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for those links. I also requested the feature to see these stats on MediaWiki and someone is looking into it. Hopefully someone puts something together as I think it could be an interesting tool to find new projects and communities to join. Jimmyjrg (talk) 02:14, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

WikiProject: Dogs

Hello, sorry to bother you but I have joined this Dogs Project recently and I was looking at the to-do list but it hasn’t been updated since 2014! Im not sure how to edit the to-do list, some of the pages dont need to be on there anymore and some need to be added but it wont let me edit it. SpookMew (talk) 16:05, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

SpookMew, for the todo list specifically, it can be edited at Template:Dog opentask (which was last modified January 2022), though I admit I originally thought it would have been directly at Wikipedia:WikiProject Dogs/to do (where the 2014 date comes from)! Hope this helps! -Kj cheetham (talk) 16:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Oooh, thank you! I think I cannot edit it because its a protected page, I will have to wait and see if the moderator of project dogs edits it at some point SpookMew (talk) 16:39, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

SpookMew, it only needs "extended confirmed" access to edit it, but you are currently only "autoconfirmed". If you look at WP:XCON you can see one of the requirements is at least 500 edits, and looking at https://xtools.wmcloud.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/SpookMew you're currently a bit under 400. So you'll probably get to 500 before too long anyway. :-) -Kj cheetham (talk) 16:51, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I moved Template:Dog opentask to Wikipedia:WikiProject Dogs/to do which seemed to be more logical. Thanks for your work in updating this SpookMew — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:22, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Artsakh § wikiproject revival?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Artsakh § wikiproject revival?. I'm not certain this is the right place to put this, so feel free to move if necessary. CLYDE ^{TALK TO ME}/_{STUFF DONE} 01:18, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Renaming proposal for subcategories

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 September 18 § Category:WikiProject X members. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:31, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Update: Discussion has now been CENT-listed. As the change it proposes would also affect other projectspace namings, input from folks here would be valued. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Get a complete list of STEM categories, their subcategories, and page ids

Question - Imagine that I am a STEM educator and wanted to get a complete list of all on-topic categories, subcats, and page ids for just STEM articles on wikipedia. How would I do that?

My first attempt was looking at the categorylinks table - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Categorylinks_table, but anyone familiar with that would know that it's a dead end. Wikipedia is too over categorized (eg, "coat of arms with plants" is under botany->plants

There is also a very good reason why wikipedia is overcategorized. It's used by different folks with different agendas. A useful categorization always needs to be specific to the perspective of those organizing the information and using it to be productive. Why shouldn't coat of arms with plants" go under botany->plants? I really can't think of a reason why not, tbh.

My next attempt was to talk to the wikidata people. They responded that wikidata is not organized into categories. They pointed me to wikiprojects.

I looked at a bunch of wikiproject pages, and it looks great, but I don't see any straightforward way to get a dump of the categories, their subcats, and the pageids that belong in those subcats.

As far as I can tell, wikiprojects aren't connected/organized by anything other than html headings and links on pages. Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Science/Topics

This seems unfortunate. Mostly for selfish reasons (see initial ask) but more generally, having a well thought out ontology of knowledge on Wikipedia would be very useful. The DBPedia project tried to do that, I think, but seems to have gone dormant. And the wikidata people don't seem interested, for reasons I'm not clear on.

Part of the problem I think is that such categorizations would be somewhat situational dependent. A stem educator, for example, might have a different perspective than say a botanist or a physicist. Fair enough! But clearly the top level wikiproject folks *do* have a perspective (you can see it on their pages!), and I believe those perspectives are very useful given the effort, care and consideration that has gone into them.

If we could more formally capture the hierarchy of wikiprojects, especially for STEM, I think that would be very useful. Wikiqrdl (talk) 19:38, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

One note: if I can't convince folks to adopt 'category views' (different categorizations for different purposes) I will say one change needs to be enforced with wikipedia categories, and that it must be a directed tree with no cycles. Eg, I shouldn't end up traversing all of wikipedia by starting at some root category. And furthermore, there should be some estimate of how many pages any root node should umbrella for and effort should be made to bring it under that number. Wikiqrdl (talk) 19:47, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Ignoring Wikiprojects, is not the hierarchy of Science categories at least found at Category:Science? It's not a simple tree though. -Kj cheetham (talk) 08:12, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@Kj cheetham Categories and subcats on Wikipedia are described by the categorylinks tables. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Categorylinks_table The links between categories on wikipedia general are controlled by different people with different needs/agendas. They overload the ontology to the point that it is no longer functional or useful (eg, science -> botany -> plants -> coats of arms with plants). A proper categorization must have a narrow and defining purpose, which is why I believe 'category views' are required. The folks on the wikiproject council have a different and I believe productive categorization view about their respective categories that deserves to be captured. Is it a silver bullet for all categorization requirements? No, but it's a very big step forward. Wikiqrdl (talk) 00:17, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

See also:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Portals should be strongly encouraged to organize around sparql
• Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Is there a way to get all STEM pages on wikipedia?
• Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Category views, and – very obviously relevantly –
• Wikipedia:Content forking/Internal#Discussion forks

WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:40, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to change B-class checklist behaviour

See also: Module talk:WikiProject banner/Archive 13 § bchecklist unintuitive behaviour, and Module talk:WikiProject banner/Archive 14 § Projects that use the checklist but do not use it to autodemote

There was a proposal by User:DFlhb (and on much reflection supported by me) to make a minor change the behaviour of the B-class checklist, which I am bringing here for greater exposure.

Current situation

• A B-class checklist can be added to a project banner as an optional feature
• The checklist is completed using parameters for the 6 B-class criteria, |b1= up to |b6=
• The template will then "auto-demote" a B-class article to C-class unless all the criteria parameters are filled out and passed, e.g. |b1=yes
• Blank criteria parameters are treated the same as failed parameters, i.e. |b1= means the same as |b1=no

Proposed situation

• Blank criteria parameters will not result in articles being auto-demoted. Only an explicit |b1=no would result in the article being demoted to C-class.
• All criteria parameters marked as passed will result in a C-class article being automatically promoted to B-class.

Rationale

• It is sometimes confusing for editors to understand why typing {{WikiProject Apple Inc.|class=B}} results in the article being assessed as C-class instead of B-class. We should not expect editors to know that certain project templates are set up differently to others.
• We should trust an editor that types {{WikiProject Apple Inc.|class=B}} that they do actually understand what B-class means and so should infer that the criteria are passed. In DFlhb's words, removing pointless complexity by letting people rate things as B-class without jumping through hoops.
• It would allow editors to focus their attention on issues which really need to be solved, rather than articles which just haven't been assessed, by using categories such as Category:XYZ articles needing attention to referencing and citation
• It removes a barrier to WP:PIQA deployment.

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:56, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I definitely support |b1= being missing effectively defaulting to "yes". I'm more on the fence if |b1= is present but blank, however I'm not sure how easy it is to separate two those situations. I also note in WP:RATER, adding WikiProject Military History brings up B-Class-1 to 5, whereas WikiProject Apple Inc. doesn't bring up any of b1, etc. I assume milhist is different somehow anyway? -Kj cheetham (talk) 14:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

MILHIST explicitly hard-coded their banner to require B-class checklist and tied their rating scheme to the checklist. Honestly, I like the idea- it's clearer than Rater's often-opaque reasoning. I would rather move to using the B-class checklist to calculate articles' quality and mostly deprecate the |class= parameter instead. Another benefit is that it makes what improvements are needed clearer. With Rater, I frequently am unsure of why it rates an articles as one class or another. It's given B-class to articles lacking sources, for example, while denying B-class just because an article didn't have templated citations. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 14:28, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

This is going off-topic a bit, as there's been more than enough discussion elsewhere about the class parameter which led to WP:PIQA. But for WP:RATER, it uses ORES to predict article quality, and it's own documentation even says This is only a prediction, and may be inaccurate (occasionally wildly so). The current proposal is only about what's in the "Proposed situation" above though. -Kj cheetham (talk) 14:35, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I know that Rater uses ORES; I am frustrated that ORES is opaque and questionably accurate. Checking against the B-class checklist makes more sense- it's clearer and stricter- and I wish there was an alternative to Rater that did so.

As a side note, MILHIST will almost certainly oppose any attempt to change how their banner's checklist works, but they also use a bot to auto-assess all of the parameters so it isn't an issue; and they use a slightly different assessment criteria anyhow. This proposal seems to be (should be) restricted to those projects that use the regular criteria. SilverTiger12 (talk) 14:46, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I concur with your side note. -Kj cheetham (talk) 15:20, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

The proposal here is for a change to the default B-class checklist so MilHist's would not be affected. However it would be great in the future if we could find a system that all projects could support. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:48, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

My views here are similar to Kj cheetham. I'm curious as well about the depreciation of the checklist but will wait for that separate discussion which I think should happen after this one. — Ixtal ^{( T / C )} ⁂ Non nobis solum. 09:00, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

• Here's a better idea: deprecate B-class checklists. As stated above, when a reviewer tags an article as |class=B, it's because they understand what B-class means. In any case, the redesigned WikiProject banner shell already ignores B-class checklists anyway, so it doesn't really matter. InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:54, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
  • I'd support depreciating the checklist parameters as well. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 23:33, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

  Can I suggest having this discussion separately as it may sidetrack this discussion? At some point I would like to explore moving the B-class checklist into the banner shell because it doesn't make any sense to assess these for each individual project. But I would be reluctant to deprecate them altogether because it is a useful tool for many editors. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:45, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps my experience is different to others but it has not been my experience that if someone types Class=B in their project header they have an understanding of the criteria that would make it so. The idea that an unfilled criterion should be considered a yes is just daft. If the person filling it in is not sure whether it passes, we should be cautious rather than risk undermining our quality standards. Monstrelet (talk) 16:09, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Well there's nothing to stop someone typing |class=A or |class=FA either . I don't think you can enforce the criteria by using a template, but it should be easier for experienced editors to assess articles. The confusing part currently is that some templates will accept |class=B and others will not. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:03, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, as the assessment system is a hierarchy, it shouldn't be possible to pass a higher grade without passing a lower, so a complete B class check should be in place for an A or FA. Also, as any editor can assess to B, IIRC, why assume only long term editors will be doing the assessment, rather than eager new editors (and I would recommend new editors to at least try assessing in order to get a better understanding of what wiki thinks make a good article). Anyway, I've said my piece. Monstrelet (talk) 08:53, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

To be honest, the system has been broken for years. As you said, there's nothing to stop someone from changing these ratings, which are arbitrary and not "official" (in a sense that, unlike GANs and FACs, there is no formal review process). That leads to situations where I often encounter a "C-class" article, and it's somehow more comprehensive and well-sourced than a "B-class" article. And while A-class is a thing, rarely do I ever seen an article being graded that. InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:16, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I'll share my rationale too. Months ago, I did a statistical analysis of WikiProjects that opt-in to B-checklists. For all the projects I looked at, 80-90% of articles in categories like Category:XYZ articles needing attention to referencing and citation were there because of missing, not failing, B-checklists. That makes them pointless for prioritizing cleanup. The two biggest projects opting-into B-checklists override this behavior to align with the current proposal: WP:FILM (code) and WP:MILHIST (code).

Autodemotion based on missing criteria is also a problem. I've regularly come across WikiProject banner shells on talk pages where someone reassessed every project to B-class, but one still shows up as C-class (due to missing B-checklist). That project gets no benefit from keeping the outdated class evaluation; outdated ratings are a much bigger problem than people rating articles incorrectly. Outside of FA/GA, ratings aren't a big deal, and I've never seen an editor rating articles incorrectly en-masse.

The underlying idea behind the current behavior is that articles need to systematically be marked as passing the B1-B6 criteria, but that's pointless busywork. Only B, C and Start-class articles are eligible for B-checklists. Among these, 75-85% (depending on the project) are Start-class. We already know they fail, likely all of B1-B6. It would be pointless to spend days filling them out.

When I come across articles with filled B-criteria, generally, only 1 or 2 criteria are failing, the rest are passed. That's the main point of B-checklists: identifying articles which just need a bit of work to reach B-class. Or to clarify why articles that look like they should be rated B-class, aren't, or why one that used to be B-class was demoted. This proposal preserves those use cases, while making B-checklist categories more useful, and leading to fewer outdated class ratings due to missing checklists; all-around win. DFlhb (talk) 19:13, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Hear, hear. -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:18, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

• I support the proposal, but I'd also support getting rid of the checklists altogether and to streamline and simplify the assessment system. —Kusma (talk) 20:44, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
• Though this proposal was presented before possibly discussing the continued merits of the checklists, I think it needs to be reversed. If there is support to outright move the B-class checklists, that solves this issue because the checklists go away. We should take the time to sort that out I feel rather than half-heartedly agree with an implementation change, if it's possible consensus in a discussion in the near future will just say get rid of the checklists. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 00:27, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  B-class checklists aren't universal. Projects choose to opt-in to them because they think it's useful to them. There's nothing to get rid of because it's already optional, and it really doesn't sit right with me that we would tell these projects that they're not allowed to run their assessments the way they want. Frankly I'd rather this be discussed at WP:FILM, WP:MILHIST, WP:COMICS, etc. among users who will be affected by it, rather than here. DFlhb (talk) 08:41, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I agree this isn't the place to gain consensus to get rid of B-class checklists. -Kj cheetham (talk) 10:19, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I wasn't trying to have this discussion here, only noting that my feelings are that this discussion should be had (where ever appropriate), and probably before a decision was made here. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 22:33, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Favre1fan93: in my many years on this site, one thing I have learned is that proposals which involve major changes are unlikely to attract consensus. Therefore I am constantly looking for smaller incremental changes which will hopefully not be controversial but will still be an improvement. Please feel free to start a proposal on abolishing the B-class checklists - I may even support it (it would certainly make my life much easier by removing a headache in implementing PIQA). But please consider supporting this smaller change which would be an improvement on the status quo. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:53, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Favre1fan93 in case you missed my reply — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:24, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Are there any other comments about this proposal? I note that no one has opposed it. There was some discussion about going further and deprecating altogether, but there has been no formal proposal to this effect. So could we start with this smaller step, which will help to harmonise ratings between projects and allow WP:PIQA to proceed, which is very strongly supported by the community? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:37, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Code prepared in the sandbox. For those interested, please see Module talk:Class mask/testcases3. The yellow sections are those where the proposed new logic gives a different output. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:18, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

Stubs that aren't stubs

I've been looking at Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs. Some of these are stubs (e.g., long lists of animal species with almost no text) but most of them aren't. The problem is – who wants to go through a list of 1,000 pages to find the handful that interest you? I offer a way to do this:

This huge Petscan link will show the list for WikiProject Politics. Just find the name of the WikiProject on the page, change it to match your favorite WikiProject's template's name, and click the "Do it!" button.

If you remove the stub tags from the end of non-stub articles, and update the article quality ratings on the talk page, then the bot will remove that page from the list when it runs again (next week). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Implementing move from "members" to "participants"

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 September 18 § Category:WikiProject Foo members has been closed with consensus to move to "participants" wording. Although that CfD was technically just about categories, given that the exact same arguments apply to participant lists at project pages, userbox language, etc., it is presumed that most wikiprojects will want shift to the new standard. Help from the WikiProject Council in implementing that shift would be appreciated. Any templates that are used to create new projects/userboxes/etc. are particularly important; I see that {{WikiProject}} has long used "Participants", so that one is all set. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:06, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WikiProject banner shell/redirect

Template:WikiProject banner shell/redirect has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. 65.92.244.127 (talk) 06:03, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

WikiProject participation

I thought some of you might be interested in these numbers.

Numbers of unique editors making at least one edit

Place	Registered editors		Unique IPs
	ever	2023	ever	2023
Village pumps	26,102	1,953	10,410	–
WikiProjects	56,619	4,380	21,551	565
AFDs	161,875	7,910	85,392	–
any edit at all	~13.9 million	656,311	–	–

In short, editors are significantly more likely to edit a WikiProject's talk page than to edit a Village pump. If you are interested in this, then there is more detail at Wikipedia:Request a query#Village pump participation, Wikipedia talk:Village pump#Who posts at the Village pumps?, and Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#AFD participation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:30, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Question re: notifications at WikiProject Women in Music

See also: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Music § Move_discussion_notifications?

WikiProject Women in Music used to receive lots of notifications about move discussions, but not so much lately. If any WikiProject Council folks know what might have changed, or how to fix this, please comment here. Thanks! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 17:27, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

@Another Believer, I see "Notifying talk pages of WikiProjects which aren't subscribed to Article Alerts" at User:RMCD bot. If your group set up AA, then it looks like that would automagically opt them out of direct RMCD notifications. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Inactive WikiProject banner

Template:Inactive WikiProject banner has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 13:00, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WPBannerMeta

Template:WPBannerMeta has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 13:04, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WikiProject Molecular Biology/doc

Template:WikiProject Molecular Biology/doc has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 13:19, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

WikiProject Editor Retention

Missing in your directory. rootsmusic (talk) 23:19, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think those pages are maintained any longer. The hope was to replace them with a bot-maintained Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory, but the bot stopped last year. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing A WikiProject's members should manually maintain its own listing in the directory, which is where I've been finding the existance of many WikiProjects. Then the only need for a bot would be annually checking that a WikiProject hasn't become inactive. rootsmusic (talk) 01:19, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

The bot was doing far more. Compare the detailed information from the bot at Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Musicians against the one-line entry in Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Culture/Music#Popular musicians. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Requested move: WikiProject Terrorism

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Terrorism#Requested move 6 November 2023 Iskandar323 (talk) 12:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

This proposal seems to be based on a misunderstanding; namely, the OP was unaware of the WP:NOTPART policy, and thought that this small group of people needed to be nonconsensually renamed by outsiders so that their name would align with [one view of] the Manual of Style. Only the OP and I have commented, and it has unfortunately been re-listed rather than closed.

This doesn't come up too often, so I'm a little hesitant to suggest adding a line about this to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide. It's WP:CREEPY if this comes up once a decade, but it may become necessary if this becomes a once-a-year problem. WikiProject names are both personal [we shouldn't be forcibly renaming small groups of people any more than we should be forcibly renaming individual editors – which is to say, there are limits, but "your name doesn't comply with the Manual of Style" isn't a justification] and also have aspects of the long-settled WP:PROJSCOPE debates (editors really did insist that certain WikiProjects, based on their name alone, were/weren't "allowed" to tag certain articles as being within their scope). I hope this will be the only case of this that we see for years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:18, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Wikiproject Norman history revival

Hi, I would like to revive the defunct Wikipedia:WikiProject Norman history as I feel it has great potential and unfortunately fell due to inactivity. The closest project to it would be Wikipedia:WikiProject France but Norman history is so much more, covering not just the region of Normandy but the Normans themselves. ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 22:42, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

What about converting it to a task force of WikiProject France? Maybe discuss at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject France, and see if anyone else is interested? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:08, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Well the problem I see with Norman history being grouped with France is that the Normans were not just French, they were also English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Not all of Norman history can be seen as just French. ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 08:37, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough - Wikipedia:WikiProject History?? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:09, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Ok, yes it would make sense to have Norman taskforce at WikiProject History. ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 12:31, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

How would I go about making one? ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 12:32, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

The main challenge in reviving a WikiProject is finding other people. It looks like three editors listed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Normandy#Participants are still around; maybe go chat them up. You really need six or ten people to have a decent chance of the group being useful a year from now.

@KINGHB190, have you read WP:REVIVE yet? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:24, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

• I will note that Normans and Normandy and the Norman language still exist. The Duchy of Normandy is composed of the Channel Islands, which is Crown Possession of the British Crown, and on the islands they speak the Norman Language. So, it is not only a historical topic, it is also a current topic. So since WP:EUROPE is inactive, perhaps WP:WikiProject European Microstates as a taskfoce ? -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 01:26, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

  Would it really be considered a microstate though? And that also kind of brings it back around to a geographical problem as the Normans also spread to many other countries. ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 10:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

  Normandy is currently a microstate in Europe (as a non-sovereign microstate that is a crown possession). Various European people/country projects do tag topics that lie outside of Europe if that group is involved. There's also Wikipedia:WikiProject European history which would seem a better fit than WP:HISTORY, as a project on the history of a European people, the Normans. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 02:56, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  Okay, how would I go about creating a Norman taskforce for WP European History? ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 11:29, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know which is the most appropriate WikiProject, but Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide/Task_forces#Converting_existing_projects_to_task_forces is probably worth a look at. -Kj cheetham (talk) 11:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  I have left a message on the talk page of WP European history notifying the parent project of the future taskforce. ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 14:22, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

  The task force has been created.

  Wikipedia:WikiProject European history/Norman history task force ☘️ King ᚺᛒ ☘️ Talk, Guestbook 22:25, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject European history needs to be updated to account for the new taskforce -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 03:19, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not convinced 3 days really meets "Allow ample time for participants in a less-active group to object.". And to reiterate what others have said, finding more participants is key. -Kj cheetham (talk) 16:06, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

As WhatamIdoing says, your main focus should be on finding more participants, otherwise the task force will not be successful — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:09, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:A review toolbox

Template:A review toolbox has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. -- 65.92.247.90 (talk) 08:18, 17 November 2023 (UTC)