Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/Self-assessment

Self-assessment

This subpage is created to facilitate self-evaluation by members of WikiProject Opera. The purpose is to identify what works and does not work for community groups on Wikimedia Foundation projects, to help promote good practices across projects. It is also intended to help brainstorm ways for community groups to reach out to new users interested in their areas, to help encourage growth for Wikipedia. I will be presenting information gathered from this conversation to the Wikimedia Foundation, both to help provide guidelines to other projects and to see if there is anything the Foundation can do to better facilitate your work. Your contribution here is very much appreciated. There is certainly overlap in some of the questions and some of your responses may seem redundant; please don't worry about this. Brainstorming is very welcome here, as it may help other responders to consider different aspects. Conversation can be helpful to generate a kind of consensus view of the issues as well as to note individual opinions. Please feel free to add your answers below and to discuss the answers others have left. Thanks! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:23, 29 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Background reading

WikiProject Opera in The Signpost (May 18, 2009)
WikiProject Opera: History and statistics

How "healthy" is your project?

Would you say that your project is thriving, declining, effectual, struggling, etc.? Do the members of the project interact well with one another? Do members typically feel welcome and included? This space is to share your opinion of the overall current status of your project.

The project was started in 2004. Seven years and 7000+ articles later I'd describe it as "holding its own". The number of active members is smallish but viable, and has remained static over the last three years. Some very active members have left the project (many of whom have left Wikipedia completely during that time), but they have fortunately been replaced by new ones. I joined the project in June 2007 after editing in the area for over a year. I felt welcomed and gradually became more and more involved. I find my current colleagues to be helpful and supportive and we even have some good laughs. But I'm sure there may have been some past or present members who have had different and possibly negative experiences. I hope very much that we will hear from members who have had less positive experiences with the project and what they thought the main problems were. Voceditenore (talk) 15:14, 30 August 2011 (UTC) expanded 15:53, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience, the project is quite a pleasant island in Wikipedia, little screaming, great courtesy, knowledgeable but open. Or to put in in another perspective, elitist, self-satisfied, omphalocentric.....er, only joking (I think). One reason I started contributing (here and in the descendant Wagner project, of which more later) is that over the past few years I have been carrying out research in an opera-related field and found this a really useful arena (in creating or editing articles) to try to organise my thoughts/summarise the sources I had come across, and try to express comments whilst getting them treated to what was in effect a non-antagonistic (generally!) 'peer-review'. Boringly I endorse Voceditenore's comments on supportiveness. And the success of the project and its descendants can be assessed, to some extent, by the hits it receives. Richard Wagner at about 60,000 hits per month could perhaps claim to be one of the world's leading authorities on the topic. Other 'good' or 'featured' WP articles include Gilbert and Sullivan (20,000), Tosca (17.500), and among less top-line subjects L'incoronazione di Poppea 3,000, Nixon in China (opera), 3,500 - which indicates the project (or at least the project's topics) are reaching the world out there.

The Wagner sub-project is perhaps of interest because it has been driven by a smaller group of stalwarts and may now have gone almost as far as it is likely to go (see its discussion page). Then there is the G&S project,the luxuriant Montenegro of our Yugoslavia. But there is still a hell of a lot to do in the main project, in terms not only of operas but singers, companies, theatres, producers, etc. Not only new articles, but revising many on important topics which are presently comparatively feeble. We could certainly do with newcomers. We don't really know what attracts/deters them. Does the knowingness of comments, e.g., on the project discussion page put newcomers off by suggesting a clique? (Not a problem for an insensitive brute like me, but might be for many). How do we 'advertise' for recruits - can we stage a sort of virtual 'open day' within the Wikipedia structure?....more meanderings to follow under the other headings.--Smerus 17:00, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

I try to stay out of this until you guys have finished talking and as a rule of thumb will wait a few days after the last comment before adding my two bits, but I just wanted to say that Wikipedia:WikiProject Richard Wagner is interesting. I had not seen a project that had gone dormant because it had achieved its mission before. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:14, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Small, but healthy and effective

Thank you very much for your feedback. :) This is what I'm reading:

While small, the project is perceived as generally healthy, with a supportive atmosphere. Membership is static, with roughly the same number of active participants over time as people join to replace departing members. The project is healthy in that articles under its purview are routinely accessed by readers. There remains a lot of work to be done, although some sub-protects may be completing their missions (as with the Wagner groups).

Please let me know if I've missed anything, and if you would like to add or expand or if this inspires further thoughts, you're certainly welcome to add them, whether you have responded to the question or not. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:03, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What does this project do well?

What are some of the best examples of this project's successes? This space is for exploring what your project does well--whether those successes are innovative (coming up with new ideas or approaches) or simply examples of successfully following through on established practices.

Projects are essentially a social grouping, and I think on the whole what we do well is providing a space for editors in the area (whether they are members or not) to discuss article issues they have encountered and to find fellow editors who have access to reference books, have expert knowledge in a particular area, or who can help translate sources from other languages. We have a very active talk page with 104 pages of archives. We also provide guides to formatting articles on opera subjects, doing online research in the area, and dealing with copyright issues that are particularly relevant to our subject.
The project has also been crucial to expanding the breadth of coverage of opera and opera-related topics on Wikipedia, largely through "Composer(s) of the Month" for creating articles for operas by various composers in The Opera Corpus which began in 2006 and continues to this day. From November 2007 to December 2009, we also had "Singer(s) of the Month" which focused on creating missing articles on singers, especially historic ones. In addition, we have at least one member who is very active in Did you know, which helps raise the profile not only of the subject matter, but also of the project. Another profile raiser was getting Portal:Opera to Featured portal status in 2009.
However, we cannot take credit for producing Featured articles and other types of in-depth coverage. Virtually all of those under our banner were achieved by non-members working individually or in collaboration with one other (non-member) editor, although in several cases project members have been able to help in a subsidiary role providing resources and illustrations. At least up to now, project members have been quite leery of the Good Article process, after some very poor experiences there, and for better or worse haven't been interested in jumping through the time-consuming, albeit worthy, hoops of the Featured Article process either. Voceditenore (talk) 11:40, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Resources, motivation & outreach

The project works best in providing feedback and resource access to members, including external references and translation assistance as well as the project's own guidelines on how to work with specific issues in developing articles. The project also provides motivation by focusing on specific subjects. While project members have not been active in external peer review processes with articles, the Portal:Opera is featured and subject articles are regularly featured at DYK, which may raise the project's profile.

Is that the nutshell? While I have only begun self-assessments, other projects have not mentioned material such as your guide to online research and guide to copyright issues. Those intrigue me. I want to be sure to highlight those. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:11, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What challenges face your project?

In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges that your project faces or has faced in succeeding on Wikipedia? These challenges can be issues that you have overcome or issues that you are still facing.

Fortunately, the nature of our topic area means that we don't have some of the challenges facing other projects. For one thing we still have lots of subjects to write on and existing articles to develop and from a very wide range of historical periods and countries which can appeal to a variety of editors. And, our subject matter is not normally subject to the controversies, recentism, and extreme "point of view" editing which plague many areas of Wikipedia.
I'd say that one of our biggest challenges is dealing with the biographies of living opera singers and composers. We get an awful lot of articles written by the subjects themselves, or their publicity agents. The referencing is often dire or non-existent and the vast majority of them are inappropriately written, to say the least!. Many of them are also not notable and are looking to Wikipedia to "raise their profile" or provide a free website. We face similar problems with some arts organizations as well. Dealing with these problems can be a massive time-sink. The bios of famous singers (living or deceased recently enough to still have fans) can also be a pain, between the attempts of their fans to turn their articles into hagiographies and their detractors who simply want to to put the boot in. Voceditenore (talk) 15:57, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Self-promotion and fan perspectives

While escaping some of the "point of view" conflicts that trouble Wikipedia in general, the project does have issues with biographies of living performers, composers and arts organizations self-promoting or being promoted by fans. Too, detractors particularly of living or recently living performers can introduce bias.

Is this a fair nutshell? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:20, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What could make this project fail?

In a "worst case" scenario, what circumstances could make this project fail?

A significant decline in the number of active participants. If that happens, "looking after" (even in the most minimal way) the number of articles under the project banner, answering queries etc. would become so daunting for the remaining people in the project that they could well give up on it. Voceditenore (talk) 15:23, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I do not believe there is any way I can craft a nutshell for this. :) I'll just use your answer wholesale, if you don't mind. If any other project members would like to expand or argue, please let me know. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Where could this project improve?

In your opinion, what steps could the members of this WikiProject take to help reach its goals?

As was pointed out by another editor here, this somewhat begs the question of what this project's goals are. In my view (see my comments under "What does this project do well?" above), the aim of this project has largely been to encourage and support writers, i.e. editor-oriented goals. But we also work to ensure a minimum level of quality and of consistency in the formatting and categorization of opera-related articles, i.e. reader-oriented goals. These reader-oriented goals are more problematic and are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as the number of articles grows and the number of participants remains static.
Although we do keep watches on new articles and notifications of unreferenced BLPs and pretty much deal with them in a timely (albeit "basic") manner, we have a considerable backlog of articles that do not measure up to the standards we'd like to see. I'm not talking about incomplete but accurate articles so much, but rather those with very poor referencing and writing style. Many of them were written in the early days of Wikipedia when the referencing standards were not as high as they are now and many editors just wrote off the tops of their heads (some of it quite opinionated) or what they remembered from past reading, etc.. Because of this, many of these articles are not only poorly referenced, but very inaccurate and sometimes slanted. A related problem arises from transwikied articles from the non-English Wikipedias. These are often created by editors without that much interest in or knowedge of the actual subject, are inaccurately translated, and because the non-English Wikipedias have generally very lax or non-existent referencing, we end up with yet more articles needing serious attention and fact-checking.
Our "Opera(s) of the Month" (begun in 2009) focuses on improving existing articles on specific operas. We've made some headway via that process by keeping the monthly goals "do-able", e.g. picking three or four operas needing improved referencing, fact-checking, or copy editing. But the progress is slow, and the work not to all editors' tastes. So... I'd say that one of the main ways we could improve the reader-oriented aspect of the project's work is to recruit more members, and especially ones with a high level of committment.
However, new members rarely arrive with a high level of committment in place. It usually develops gradually and negative interactions (both perceived or real) can reduce the level of committment or even cause new members to leave. Making sure that new members feel welcome and encouraged obviously also improves the editor-oriented aspect of the project's work. Voceditenore (talk) 10:02, 1 September 2011 (UTC) expanded 15:49, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome and encouraging new members

The project has a primary aim to encourage and support writers and a secondary goal of ensuring quality and consistency. The latter is more challenging as the number of articles increase without a proportional increase in participants to monitor and improve them. Monthly focuses on improving articles in specific subject areas have helped, but a greater help would be the increase of highly-committed new members. Both goals are advanced by welcoming and encouraging new members.

Please let me know if this nutshell misses the mark. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:28, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How can this project expand?

How can this project reach out to and nurture newcomers to Wikipedia who share an interest in the project's goals?

I actually have no idea whether anyone here does any reaching-out or nurturing, nor do I have much experience of this myself. An online contact of mine who was already active here emailed me suggesting that I might be interested in joining the project. We had an email exchange about what needed doing and then I started doing it and learning things as I went on. In my early days I also had out of the blue helpful hints from a few people unknown to me (i.e. not Opera Project members) - things like drawing my attention to WP:R#NOTBROKEN.

I'm not at all clear how people find out about the project; my own experience (above) probably isn't typical. I have a large number (~3,000) of pages on my watchlist (by no means all opera-related) and it occurs to me that contacting people (many of them IPs) unknown to me who make constructive edits to opera-related articles and pointing out the existence of the project might bring in a few new recruits. Looking at the 250 changes currently on my watchlist and excluding non-opera-related things, vandalism and reverts, category alterations, activities by bots and interwiki stuff, I see 9 usernames unknown to me (mostly red links) and 5 IPs. It wouldn't kill me to contact all of them! Other members will have their own watchlists, of course, so some co-ordination would be needed.

The other thing that strikes me is the WP:WPO page. One of our main industries (albeit now slowing down) is creating articles on operas, and a lot of sensible guidelines have been developed in order to give the articles a standard look-and-feel (I wonder how many other projects have as many guidelines as we do?), but the result does potentially look rather daunting and, I'd say, rather plainly presented (it growed like Topsy). Looking at other projects' front pages and discussing streamlining ours to present a more user-friendly appearance - with, perhaps, a more informative list of members (interests and suchlike) and more sub-pages - might be beneficial. --GuillaumeTell 17:32, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On reaching out, it seems we have been reached out to by the German language Opera Project (see Project Talk Page). Which seems to me to offer very interesting opportunities, save for the rather intimidatingly excellent English of Non mi tradir (talk) compared to my feeble German.....--Smerus 20:23, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unfamiliar editor outreach & cross-wiki coordination

What I'm seeing here:

Reaching out to unfamiliar people who make constructive edits to articles in the project scope may bring in recruits. It could be a good idea to coordinate outreach efforts to this kind so that those with shared items on their watchlists do not duplicate work. Cross-wiki expansion may also be possible, with the German language Opera Project having initiated contact.

A decent nutshell? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 12:32, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Conclusion

Hi. This has been dormant long enough that I think I can probably wrap it up. I tremendously appreciate the time you've taken to give feedback. :)

Since nothing has been added since the nutshells above, I am not reproducing those here; they will go into my report as written. In addition, I have the following to say:

Project members self-assess project, though small, as healthy and measure some success by the number of readers of their articles. Their strengths include providing feedback and guidance to members and keeping up motivation with improvement drives. Challenges include the need to keep content particularly on living performers neutral, without allowing fans or detractors to bias them. With the life of the project dependent on sustained interest of contributors and the increase in number of articles raising the amount of maintenance work, the project would benefit by reaching out to expand membership, which it could do by touching base with new or unfamiliar contributors who constructively edit its articles and by fostering cross project coordination.
Responders are all older contributors (in terms of “time in service”) who are primarily focused on writing articles.
Conclusions: Nutshell: Asked to weigh in on six questions related to the health of the project, its challenges and its growth points, the project arrives at the following:

The project feels it produces good product and supports its members well.

The biggest content challenge it faces is neutrality.

With stable size and growing responsibilities, the project could use more members.

Coordinated outreach to like-minded editors who are not already involved in the project could be helpful.

In my report, this is followed by the questions and the nutshell above as well as an analysis of your contributions. You guys do an impressive amount of article work, by the way. I admire your editing profiles. :) (If you want to see what I saw, check out X!'s Edit Counter: [1].)

Please let me know if you think I've mistaken anything, and, again, thank you so much for your time. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:17, 28 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Maggie. Thank you for initiating this. Making us think about these issues has already borne fruit. I've revamped our project page per GuillaumeTell's excellent suggestion to make it less daunting, and I hope more welcoming. It was long overdue. I've also revamped and updated the invitation and welcome templates. Next month, we'll give some thought to using them a bit more and reminding the members that they exist. In fact, I'd forgotten we had them! Best, Voceditenore (talk) 17:44, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]