Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Weather

2024–25 WikiProject Weather Good Article Reassessment

I would like to announce that a new task force has been created to re-examine the status of every GA in the project. Many good articles have not been reviewed in quite a while (15+ years for some) and notability requirements have changed quite a bit over the years. The goal of this task force is to save as many articles as possible. Anyone not reviewing an article may jump in to help get it up to par if it does not meet the GA requirements. The process will start officially on February 1 and will continue until every article has been checked and either kept or delisted. The task force may be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Weather/2024–25 Good Article Reassessment. Noah, AA^Talk 15:22, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Articles under review

• 1949 Texas hurricane (review)
• Windsor Locks, Connecticut, tornado (GAR)
• Wind shear (GAR)

Unifying monsoon page names

While I looked at Monsoon#Global monsoon, I noticed that all articles used in Template:Main are inconsistently named.

There is:

• North American Monsoon
• Monsoon of South Asia
• East Asian Monsoon
• Australian monsoon (note that monsoon is not capitalized in contrast two the first two)

There might be more pages about regional monsoon than just these 4 which also need to be accounted for.

Every page there is named differently. What should the preferred main article name be?

"Reposted" from Old revision of Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) as apparently this should be the right place. NetSysFire (talk) 10:58, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

As "monsoon" is not part of a proper noun, I think the appropriate way to title these is to use the Australian page as a model. I would name these "North American monsoon", "South Asian monsoon", "East Asian monsoon", and "Australian monsoon". DJ Cane _(he/him) (Talk) 21:31, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Computer simulation#Requested move 2 April 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Computer simulation#Requested move 2 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 01:54, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Project newsletter?

There used to be a newsletter for the tropical cyclone project. I still think it's useful to have something to let people know about what's going on. Have editorials, notices about newly improved articles, discussions, that kind of stuff. Maybe call it the Wiki Weather Weekly (and put it out however often we want). I think it could be cool to have a weather event of the week, which can highlight various types of weather. Maybe a blizzard happens one week in one part of the world, and there's a wildfire that happens over an entire month. Having some degree of newsletter across all of the projects could foster a bit of project unity and coordination. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 23:04, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

New Proposed Criteria for U.S.-inclusion on Tornadoes of XXXX articles

TornadoInformation12 has proposed new criteria for the current inclusion criteria for Tornadoes of XXXX articles (ex. Tornadoes of 2024). You can see and participate in the proposal discussion here! The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 18:12, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

RFC on Food and Health at Climate change

There is an RFC requesting that editors choose between one of two draft sections on Food and Health in the article on Climate change. Please take part in the RFC. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:27, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

RFC for Additional Proposed Criteria for WP:TornadoCriteria

There is an RFC requested that editors choose whether or not two additional criteria should be formally added to WP:TornadoCriteria. You can participate in the RFC here. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 19:13, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Infobox storm replacement and footers

Hopefully this ia a good place to bring this up. There seems to be an effort underfoot to replace {{infobox storm}} with {{infobox weather event}}, and since I'm doing my bit in cleaning up lint errors, I've come across cases where people have done this replacement, but didn't know they needed to include a footer (which {{infobox storm}} apparently didn't need), resulting in lint errors and issues with infobox display. I'm pretty sure there have been any number of similar cases that someone else has taken care of.

So, in order to minimize extra cleanup, it seems like it'd be useful to put up a notice about needing to add a footer - somewhere the people participating in this infobox conversion project would be most likely to see it, and I'm not sure where that would be. Gamapamani (talk) 07:38, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Although the template {{infobox weather event}} is currently semi-protected, if you need to put a notice before your account gets verified, you can discuss your suggestion on the template's talk page.

Once your account is verified, you would be able to add a larger notice to the template page directly (instead of the brief mention within the inline text). 2601:2C1:8B80:349F:4A93:1681:C693:D291 (talk) 05:57, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions. This is kind of funny, because I actually added this comment to the template's talk page at first, but then moved it over here instead after reading the suggestions there about the page not being read much, as opposed to here. Anyway, I went ahead and changed the template doc to show the header requirement more prominently. I guess I should have that in the first place, but I was thinking about some project page somewhere where people would be able to see the notice even if they didn't read the docs carefully. Gamapamani (talk) 09:16, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

WebCite Archives: Imminent Danger Warning

The service webcitation.org is used frequently in weather articles particularly tropical typhoons and cyclones.

We believe it will go completely dark at some point in the future: All webcitation.org URLs should be assumed to no longer work in the future.

WebCite went completely offline for a year and half. Then it was restored, but in shaky condition.

Bots can not help for technical reasons. It will require manual intervention. After WebCite disappears, the citations will no longer be accessible, and there is a possibility the entire citation and the material that cites it could be deleted per WP:V. This situation could be devastating for all of these articles due to the scale of WebCite usage.

There is no immediate need to panic because we have no information of an imminent WebCite failure. However, preparations for failure should begin now before it is too late.

Please note that attempting to save WebCite links at Archive.org might give the appearance of working, but actually does not work, there is in insidious technical snare built into WebCite to prevent the Wayback Machine from saving their links (correctly). It is recommended to use archive.today if you choose. Even better is find the original link and find an archive for it at Wayback or Today. -- GreenC 17:01, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

@GreenC: Thanks for the heads up and this has been something I have been worried about for a few years, and I am disappointed that the internet archive, despite appearing to work, will not save the links properly. Is there any way of getting a list together of all articles that have links to Webcite in them?Jason Rees (talk) 20:04, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

User:Jason Rees thank you for your interest. I will generate a list of pages and URLs and post where to retrieve it. The impression count on enwiki is 37,148 as of April 24 (column H). This is non-unique count. As can be seen, there are still over 1.2 million elsewhere. It's unfortunate about Wayback, but creating copies on Archive.today should be possible. If they are saved on Archive.today, once there, my bot can do the work of replacing on wiki. The bot will find the webcite link in the article, look it up at archive.today, retrieve a new URL, and replace. Are you programmer or script writer? There might be some tools for mass saving a list of links at archive.today -- GreenC 21:26, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm not a programmer or a scriptwriter, but we have a few lurking in the project. @Chlod: for instance. Anyway, Webcite is something that I and other project members have been worried about as a lot of our articles are impacted, as some of the links contain decent information about how a system formed, dissipated, its intensity etc. Some of these links can be found again or superseded by others or dropped as the sections are reworked, but first things first we need to get a list of articles impacted together on wiki so that we can work out how badly we are impacted and maybe even clean the sections up.Jason Rees (talk) 22:28, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Before I generate a final list, I want to cleanup the links. Edits like this Special:Diff/1210676215/1221876846 which prior to yesterday was impossible due to the WebCite API being broken. Or giving that appearance. I got it to work, they have bogus SSL so it required a hack. I am doing this as fast as possible while the hack is working. After this I'll try to convert these to archive.org links. -- GreenC 14:46, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

User:Jason Rees Update: I'm converting the links, in about 20,000 pages. The rate might be as high as 50%, mostly to archive.today - it will take a week or two because it's slow for the bot to process, and I manually verify every link, due to the high rate of soft-404s at archive.today -- GreenC 02:41, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

WebCite is now down, probably for [days/weeks/years/ever] - but that's OK I got the data I needed. I can continue with the conversions to archive.today - and WebCite being down makes that easier because no one can complain about converting from a dead/unreliable site. -- GreenC 16:12, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Tornadoes of XXXX - Article format of 2022 and earlier

Not sure if this has already been brought up before, but thought I'd add this suggestion here.

Seeing how the format of 2023 and 2024 dedicate tornado sections beyond the US and differ from earlier lists (2022 and earlier), should the prior list format be updated to parallel 2023 and 2024? As it stands, the differences create 2 distinct formats for these lists, whereas there should (ideally) only be 1 format.

I understand that there are numerous template and format inconsistencies that are gradually being resolved regarding tornado articles, but the yearly tornado lists serve as the backbone for tornado articles overall. 2601:2C1:8B80:349F:4A93:1681:C693:D291 (talk) 05:48, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

You are correct. The older articles need to be updated to how the newer years look like. Of course, we can't force a mandate to change things, but there was a discussion about how best to present the yearly articles, with a consensus that organization by area, rather than month, is appropriate. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 16:07, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

I believe the consensus was to finish out 2024 to get the kinks out and reach a good standard before starting work on bringing former years to the new standard. Pinging @ChessEric, @WeatherWriter, and @TheAustinMan who IIRC were involved in that discussion to confirm my understanding is accurate. DJ Cane _(he/him) (Talk) 21:27, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm honestly starting to not be a fan of this. I like the events to be organized by month, especially since most events are in the U.S. We should finish out 2024 first before changing the older years so that we can get all the kinks out and come to a final decision. ChessEric 22:25, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Of greater importance, in my opinion, is to fix the refs on the tornado list pages. ChessEric 22:29, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Changes to Portal:Tornadoes

The recent outbreaks section at Portal:Tornadoes has been changed into a section featuring the tornado content of the current year and will automatically transclude from a list of specified articles. This should make it easier to update since only links need to be added. This change has been made in part since this portal section has not been maintained since the MfD. Noah, AA^Talk 13:55, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Severe weather: Description of random radar images and loops as "public domain"

I figure that even though this discussion pertains to WikiProject Severe weather, since it involves radar, which has many non-tornado/thunderstorm-related contexts, it should also be mentioned here. Thanks. Master of Time (talk) 16:49, 2 May 2024 (UTC)