Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Archive 16

Garbled

I have no idea what the following means, or I would try to fix it: The core topics project is mainly working to through its collaboration to improve core articles (one to FA status) – this work continues. I deleted it principally to call it to the attention of the editor who added it, in hopes that he or she would recast it to make more sense. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 02:00, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

It refers to this collaboration, which has not been very active lately. I'll try to rewrite that if things pick up over there. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Aquatics?

Is WikiProject Fishes involved? Jourdy288 (talk) 19:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Different assessment definitions

Is a project allowed to set stricter criteria than Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment, for instance requiring all B-class articles to have complete history sections (if applicable)? Thank you. --NE2 03:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I don't really like it, because it tends to break up a standard that has become pretty universal across the English Wikipedia (and spreading on the French one). However, I also respect the independence of WikiProjects, and I know that in the context of a particular project a slight refining of the criteria may be appropriate. A few projects, such as WP:MILHIST, have gone this route - they require adequate refs for all B-Class.

I would say that if you decide to do something on this, you should either:

• Consider doing what the Math project has done, and create a B+ grade (and they even refer to history in the criteria!). This is read by the bot as a simple B, but it looks different on the talk page. This would be my preference. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment.
• If you think that system won't work, then you need to make it very clear to all the WikiProject what the additional criteria are, and also make it clear that it is a little different from other projects. We have had problems at WP:CHEMS (ironically, the project where the assessment scale was invented!) where someone from outside started downgrading some of our B-Class articles for lack of inline citations, because they were following the MILHIST criteria.

Bear in mind that we are testing a new selection bot for WP1.0, and this will read all B-Class articles as being of equivalent quality. That means that if you make B-Class a much smaller group than is typical, you will find fewer of your project's articles being selected. That may be what you want, if you think the "weak B" articles are embarrassing, or you may have a high standard of articles anyway across your subject area so you can be more picky (as is the case with MILHIST, IMHO).

Finally, I think in time the standards will rise. When we first started, very few articles even had inline citations! Even some FAs! When that happens (2009? 2010?) we will have to debate where to tighten things, if at all, and your input would be welcome then - tell us about how well your modification has worked, or not! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. It looks like the B+-class math articles are actually read as GA - is it supposed to be this way? --NE2 04:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Interesting, I don't think it was always that way. They perhaps decided as a project that it would make sense. We should now be able to add "GA" as a comment into the table, for all articles that are GAs, irrespective of how they are graded. If that occurs, (when I get time to ask Oleg about it and follow through) then it would be very clear on the table which is true GA and which is B. Walkerma (talk) 05:35, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

It appears that the one current issue is that B+ has to be included in another category as well. Are you saying that in the future the bot will recognize B+ as separate? --NE2 06:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

No, I don't think so, unless there is a sea change in how assessment is done; the current system isn't perfect but no alternative is either. It'd be very hard to get several hundred projects to agree to such a change, even if it was good (I'm not convinced it is good for the whole of WP)! With either the B+ option or the "B is better" option, the tables will only recognise the existing grade levels. Walkerma (talk) 19:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

(←) Just to clarify the WP:WPM situation. Bplus used to be listed with B, but it was upgraded to refer to articles which are "almost GA", in the sense that they are GA quality modulo technical MoS issues, and overzealous interpretation of inline citation requirements. I would welcome the separate listing of good article status from the WP1.0 classes. Indeed these are really orthogonal assessments, one WikiProject based, the other community-wide. The image I have is

Stub —	Start —	B —	B+ —	A
			GA —	FA.

Geometry guy 00:39, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the clarification! I agree with you on GA, but the consensus was the status quo when I raised the issue last year. Walkerma (talk) 03:27, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Version 1.0 template cleanup

Suggest cleaning up the Wikipedia 1.0 Projects template? box that appears on the right side of this page. Specifically, removing "V0.5 to do" and "V0.5 bot list" since the version is ended, and possibly a more general reorganization by importance....

Dialectric (talk) 17:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'd like to do that soon. I'm expecting some big new changes very soon with a new bot, and I'll probably update it after that. In the meantime, feel free to clean it up! Walkerma (talk) 19:05, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Assessing importance

We now have the raw importance output from a test run of the SelectionBot (check that link for more detail) in spreadsheet format. Once it's been cleaned up we'll start evaluating the weightings for importance (in a week or so?). If anyone here wants to help with that, please post your name here and/or email me - I'll reply in a few days. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 04:23, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Renaming articles

I renamed Buddha (general) to Buddhahood, and am about to adjust the piped links with WP:AWB. The following pages from your project currently link there:

• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Buddhism articles by quality log
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Buddhism articles by quality/1
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Hindu mythology articles by quality log
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Hinduism articles by quality log
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version articles by quality log
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version articles by quality/4
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Version 0.5 articles by quality log
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Version 0.5 articles by quality/3

Would you like me to change these, too? — Sebastian 17:49, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Unnecessary. All the pages you listed above will be automatically updated with the new name the next time the bot updates those data, in the next few days. John Carter (talk) 18:17, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! You may want to keep this section for a while or write a note on the project page for others who may have the same question. — Sebastian 02:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)    (I may not be watching this page anymore. If you would like to continue the conversation, please do so here and let me know.)

How to move/rename project assessments?

Project members want to merge Wikipedia:WikiProject Horse breeds into Wikipedia:WikiProject Equine and want to know how to move/rename the existing article assessments and discontinue use of Template:WikiProject Horse breeds. Is there a bot for this task? --Una Smith (talk) 15:31, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

In this case a move of the existing article assessments and discontinuation of the deprecated template, Template:WikiProject Horse breeds, should be as simple as a redirect of the deprecated template. See this real assessment template, an example redirected deprecated template, and an example talk page with the deprecated assessment tag. --Paleorthid (talk) 17:33, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Please let us know if that works OK in your case. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 17:36, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Article improvement for "pay"?

Maybe this is a very bad idea, but there is a current proposal at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#WikiProject WikiMoney to reestablish the old WikiMoney system. I was wondering whether anyone here knew of any way to maybe acquire funding, possibly on a fairly small level (tens of thousands of dollars US, I would think at tops), to maybe encourage people to work on some of our more important articles. Clearly, the incentives would be of "in-kind" type primarily, like tickets to events, free clothing, and the like, but it might be one of the easier ways to get significant improvement on some of the most important articles. John Carter (talk) 15:47, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

I was one of the judges of the Core Contest, where Danny offered $100 cold hard cash for people to improve core articles. This goal is very dear to my heart, because these articles are the foundations of a good encyclopedia and of Wikipedia 1.0 releases - hence the need for WP:CORE, WP:VA etc. I was absolutely blown away at the amount of excellent work that was done in a two-week period, it has really made a big difference. There were around 50 entries in total, and nearly all made significant improvements; in some cases people took a Start-Class to WP:GAN-standard, or B-Class to WP:FAC, which is a huge amount of work. It's left me thinking that if I have some money (unlikely soon!) I would love to do a similar thing. It achieved more in a fortnight than our own Core Contest managed in two years.

But one critical thing is WP:COI. If person X is found (say) to be sponsoring a contest that leads to an improvement (even inadvertently) in the article about their employer, there will be howls all over the community. So we can't just have the usual wikilibertarianism where anybody does what they feel like, or we'll end up destroying a potentially good idea. Even Danny was criticised severely by some for using an unorthodox method that bypassed normal methods - it seems amazing that people would complain that someone was giving money to the community, but they did. So I think it would best be done through the Foundation, which could provide the impartiality and no-COI. If we stick with a specific list of uncontroversial core topics, it'd work even better. I'll talk with Danny, and then maybe talk to Delphine or whoever is now coordinating the 1.0 efforts on behalf of the Foundation. Nice idea, IMHO, but must be handled carefully. Walkerma (talk) 16:43, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Well I can't really say I support the idea, because I believe that the focus should be rational philosophical self-interest rather than rational monetary self-interest. I also think potential solutions can create major POV conflicts. But I do have a idea about Web 1.0 sponsorship. Companies or individuals who believe in the interests of Web 1.0 could donate money to a fund controlled by the Web 1.0 assessment team. The assessment team could price, pay out incentives on the articles they felt needed the most work. And split donate and pay out to editors who contributed to the articles.

Problems with this would be: # You couldn't allow companies to dictate which page got more focus or incentive (that would be a potential conflict of POV) #You would have to isolate the assessment team from the article editors to add security against money fraud, laundering, and conflicting interests. # Ethical rationale

Like I said, I don't support the idea... but (shrug) it's an idea.--Sparkygravity (talk) 16:47, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

To clarify, what I was thinking about was something like the following example:

• 100 (random figure) wikibucks for making a release version selection article an FA. An editor who gathers X wikibucks would then be able to deduct that amount for the expenses to going to Wikimania or some similar get together. In a sense, it encourages the people who contribute the most to articles to consider becoming more actively invovled. It might also be possible in terms of allocating scholarships to such meetings. However, in some cases, the individuals involved wouldn't want to attend anyway. In cases like that, maybe create a system where, using another random figure, 100 wikibucks might be able to be used for 10 dollars value of merchandise. In effect, someone who writes two release version FAs might get a T-shirt or something. If it were done like this, the wikibucks would still be an encouragement to contribute, and for major contributors to become more involved in the project, but would still be probably inexpensive enough to not really get people writing articles with the intention of getting "paid" for their work. John Carter (talk) 16:55, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I think wikipedia is moving rapidly enough without having to change tack. Sure there are weaker articles, but in the worst case scenario, the core articles will be of a high standard in say 5 or 10 years, and being able to say no money changed hands to tarnish the process, that's priceless. Pgr94 (talk) 00:11, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Although I have some reservations about straight cash (outlined above), I think John Carter's suggestion of using a free/discounted trip to Wikimania sounds like a great idea. Perhaps tee shirts etc for those not interested in traveling, or some other form of sponsorship for wiki-related activities. That way words like "cash" and "money" might even be avoided, and we can perhaps think of words like "travel grant" and "scholarship". Rather than setting up a whole wikibucks system (that foundered when they did it before), maybe it could be run as a simple competition. If it works as a one-off, it could be repeated every month, or whatever. Although Pgr94 is right in the long term, but "in the long term we are all dead" (who said that?). And unfortunately, many of the most important articles are the ones in the worst condition - look at Tool, the current Core Collaboration. Thanks for an interesting idea, John! I'm away this weekend, but I'll try and ask for opinions next week. Walkerma (talk) 05:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Possibly adding Dab and Redirect articles to the assessments chart?

One of the things I look at when I look at the total assessments to date chart is how many total articles have been assessed. Right now, we are kinda short of the total number of articles out there. I'm not sure if whatever it is that counts the total number of articles that exist counts dab and redirect pages as articles, but my guess is that it does. That being the case, the assessments statistics page will always fall well short of all the articles, even if all the "real" articles actually are assessed. I also don't know if that entity counts the categories, images, templates, and whatnot, but my guess is that even if it does it can be changed not to. The Dab and Redirect pages are all in mainspace, though, so I think they'll always be counted. Would there be any objections to maybe adding those two classes to the stats page, and maybe the others if they are counted in the number of total articles, just so that we can have a better idea of how many real articles remain unassessed out there? John Carter (talk) 17:26, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of us having to count all of the "non-articles" in mainspace, I think it would just add a lot more work that we don't need! I think we need to find out exactly what the various machine counters are counting - I think the total probably does NOT include redirects, for example. If there are non-articles that are being counted, I'd rather find a way for a bot or something to count those, and I think the whole community would want to know the true article count is. Walkerma (talk) 03:12, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Test output from SelectionBot

For those who don't watch all the obscure pages of this project, please take a look at the SelectionBot output. I've come up with a selection system I quite like, but it's very much a "first draft". I'd like to hear what others think of these ranking algorithms, which will allow us to pick articles automatically. Please take a look at the lists (ods files, I couldn't get the Excel ones to save) and give comments. Walkerma (talk) 03:23, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

How are you proposing to deal with projects which explicitly don't do importance, such as MilHist? I'm a coordinator for WP Films and I'm literally a few days away from proposing the abolition of importance assessment from our banner too, in favor of a fairly small "Core" list that represents about 1% of our tagged articles. (Furthermore, arts fields like Films are more difficult to rank importance for, since there is less of an information hierarchy, so to speak - all film titles are theoretically equal, aside from personal opinions otherwise. It's not like the sciences, where certain concepts are more central than others.) Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 03:46, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

We have three other methods for measuring importance - no. of views of the page, no. of links into the page, and no. of interwiki links. I prefer to have a human element in the ranking, particularly from a subject-expert, but if it's not there the other three should pick up the really important articles at least - so don't worry, our selection should include plenty of films. I understand your problem with films. Certainly having a list of "top" ranked articles is much better than no importance ranking at all, and it should be possible to be relatively objective to compile such a selection based on "Best 100 films of all time" type lists, as long as national biases can be allowed for. Walkerma (talk) 04:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I can speak for several other projects which have difficulties determining the exact importance of all the articles with which they deal. However, I can see at least potentially how it might be useful even for the film project itself to try to go through and rank for at least "Top" or "High" importance. I can easily believe, for instance, that Gone with the Wind (film), Star Wars, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal and other articles about comparatively important films might benefit from having them acknowledged as being more important than, say, Porky's Revenge. John Carter (talk) 14:30, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Expert review proposal

I have been informed of a new proposal to review articles for accuracy, at Wikipedia:Reviews. The idea does not seem to be a bad one, and I wouldn't have any objections to seeing it become successful, but I am not myself necessarily knowledgable about enough subjects to know how necessary it would be in most areas. I do note that it would be potentially extremely useful for religious subject matter. I would welcome any input on the subject at the talk page. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 14:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh dear. This combines a new group of functionaries with poorly-defined powers, a self-perpetuating selection and promotion process, no requirement for actual qualifications, and vague criteria for membership; and a review process that only checks discrete facts, has no academic validation, and litters articles with oversized banners. It's basically taking all the worst aspects of every existing review process we have and lumping them together into a new, bureaucratic whole. Kirill 15:23, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

You have several points. As indicated on the talk page, I think this might work best with Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check. But it might not be a bad idea to have some sort of full, formal review of at least some of the more potentially biased articles submitted for the CD before their inclusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by John Carter (talk • contribs) 16:59, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I would also highly recommend spending some time perusing the content review workshop discussions currently underway, and interacting closely with those editors, before adding yet another review process to Wikipedia. One of the main goals of the workshop is to make the current gamut of reviews more streamlined, efficient, and integrated - possibly by merging some too. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 21:58, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the aim is good, and we will need a system to check facts. However, I think the system as described is unlikely to work in practice. Most systems with this level of sophistication grow from something simple, by consensus of the community - I've yet to see a one-person initiative like this gain traction. We definitely want to be able to improve the quality of the content of the next release, but I'd prefer to see reform of existing systems rather than a whole new, complicated system. It seems to me that true peer review should be focussing more on the content rather than the technical aspects anyway. But at present the WikiProjects mainly fulfil that role, somewhat informally.

One other grave concern with this idea, is how the process is designed. Kirill rightly points out the shortcomings of the reviewing process, but it is also unclear what will happen to the article after review. If I have invested 20 hours of my time fact-checking a major article thoroughly (I suspect that will be the time needed to do the job properly), the value of my work is largely destroyed after one edit - you can no longer trust the article. Once (if?) we have the flagged revisions option available to us, I think we can set up a system based around that. I still hope to see m:Wikicite available to us as well, which could make the work much more streamlined.

Let's hope this contributor can work with the community, and perhaps contribute his ideas and opinions to the existing fora such as WP:CRW (the ideal place) and here. I think then his ideas can have a much greater impact. Walkerma (talk) 04:02, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I also responded at Wikipedia_talk:Reviewing#Responses, and mentioned this discussion. Walkerma (talk) 04:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Please see my response on Wikipedia talk:Reviewing. Cheers, — Thomas H. Larsen 08:38, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Need assistance

Can someone explain how we can add the multicolored assessment graph (which allows for an overview of all the articles tagged as part of a project, with colors showing how many articles have each rating) to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Contemporary music? Most of the other WikiProjects seem to have this but we don't know how to add this to our new project. Thank you, Badagnani (talk) 02:15, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Just add {{Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Contemporary music articles by quality statistics}} wherever you wanna drop it. Good luck! Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 02:30, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Assessment graph

Is there some way to have the list row line up above the assessed row? Because, as it is, there's assessed, list, total. It looks weird. Lara❤Love 04:46, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree with this, as well. Any project which has decided to use the class clearly is going to regard these articles as having already been assessed. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 04:54, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Normally Oleg watches this page and responds, but he seems to have missed it so I reposted it at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. I agree with your point. Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

FL

I just thought i'd add a small note in that i noticed an anomaly in that there were capitalised and uncapitalised versions of many of the other classes except this one, so i created a redirect. Now it is possible to do

class=FL

and

class=fl

whch produces the same result. Simply south (talk) 12:54, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Walkerma (talk) 03:48, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log

I ran Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log and the tab froze. I restarted it and it seems that all the listings that were determined in the first partial run were lost. Can these be produced?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 02:29, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm wondering if the problem is with your browser or something - I'm getting a normal-looking log entry for today. Here is the diff, maybe that will show up better for you? If the problem persists, can you give more details? Which "tab" froze? Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 03:52, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

There should be many more changes. I know for certain that Michelle Obama was promoted to GA on the 14th and it is not showing up for example.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:11, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Apparently the bot did its job by adding Michelle Obama to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality/1. Unfortunately, if the log information of a partial run is lost, it can't be recovered. My suggestion would be to not run the bot for very long projects, like Chicago, and rather wait for the scheduled runs. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I just ran the page at http://www.math.ucla.edu/~aoleg/wp/wp10/run_wp10.html and it froze again. The following is the last text on the page:

Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F29&action=edit&oldid=&section= Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F30&action=edit&oldid=&section= Submitting Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality/30. Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F30&action=edit --TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, that's what I mentioned before, you should not run the script for long projects. The server I am running it on seems to cut off exceedingly long requests. The web-based interface is better for smaller projects. Big and established projects better wait for the standard four-day run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:49, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

In the past scheduled runs occurred either every two or three days. Thus, when it got to the fourth day I assumed something was down.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 16:33, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

The KLF

From the FAQ, this was added by Walkerma a long time ago: "There has been much discussion also on smaller, specialised releases, perhaps on Chemistry or The KLF." Really? A 0.7 release covering the band, The KLF? - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:26, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It wouldn't be a V0.7 release, it would be simply a collection of the KLF articles, many of which are quite well developed. If you're interested in helping put together such a release, let us know. Walkerma (talk) 03:32, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Idolatry

Hello,

I've noticed that Idolatry was selected for inclusion into Version 1.0 of wikipedia. To avoid accusations of religious bias, I'd like to request that Iconodule or Hagiography or Icon is also included.

Clinkophonist (talk) 12:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about the first two, but icon would be a good choice. Please can you nominate it at WP:V0.7N and I'll review it. Thanks! Walkerma (talk) 18:44, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Article name changes

Could not see any obvious guidence, so I'm posting here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Medicine_articles_by_quality/32 currently has an entry for Wheals which was inferer to the existing referrenced Wheal, also Welt (medicine) is just alternative name for the same thing. I've merged the lot into Wheal, but can't see how to change the redirect issues here in your listings. David Ruben ^Talk 14:49, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. If an article that had previously been assessed separately is now a redirect, though, simply change the assessment of the redirect to "redirect" or "non-article" and the bot will automatically adjust the listings on its next run through. If you're talking about something else, maybe a bit of clarification would help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by John Carter (talk • contribs) 14:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah thanks - that us what I needed to know (that automatically done by a bot) David Ruben ^Talk 22:51, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

FL-class article assessment

Hi there. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've been trying to add an FL-class section to the "article scorebox" at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/College football articles by quality statistics Is there a way to properly create this so that the article assessment bot will update the scorebox with any new FL-class articles in the project (based, of course, on the templates from the talk pages)? JKBrooks85 (talk) 22:33, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Reviewed article on set theory

Hi, The page on set theory is marked as both vital and reviewed. I am not sure what the review process involves, but as a mathematician I think that page is low quality. It has more objections than content and does not do the topic justice. I have several simple books on my shelf that have a much better starting intro than the wikipedia page on set theory. I am not sure how to mark these quality issues, and I am not in the math-editing mode these days to spend time to rewrite that page. But I think you guys should know, so maybe it can get improved. Thanks History2007 (talk)

"Vital" means that the article is considered very, very important. "Reviewed" means that the article was, at some point, reviewed by one of our editors, who presumably knew something about mathematics, unlike me, and was found at that time to be free from serious, unverifiable error. That doesn't necessarily mean that the article is "good", though. We have several articles which are about important subjects that, well, need a lot of work. Allah, Dushanbe, and Anatomy are other examples of important articles that aren't very good yet. It is our intention to try to focus attention on these important articles, though. If at some point you could help with this or any article, it would be very much appreciated. John Carter (talk) 00:54, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I will try to do some editing on that page. But if I were to do that on all pages that bother me, I would need 36 hours a day to do it. I think there is a more fundamental issue here:

Wikepedia has clearly demonstrated that the centralization of knowledge by the users for the users can have substantial benefits. Yet, as I look at the more technical pages, I am often alarmed by the glaring errors that exist in plain sight. In many cases, it appears that well meaning students may be contributing text by copying paragraphs from various online sources, but the end result is less than correct. And these are not just obscure pages, but pages that are designated as vital.

Wikepedia pages that deal with city locations and major sights, or with literary figures and their list of books seem to be mostly error free and can be relied upon. But on more complex topics (such as biochemistry) where I am not an expert, I hesitate to rely on Wikepedia. I wonder if expert biologists get as alarmed when they read those pages, as I am when I read an advanced page on mathematics or computer science. The key problem is that the ratio of experts to general users is low, so on scientific topics we do run the risk of having an encyclopedia written by the students for the students. Clearly, one could not run a university that way and an encyclopedia should not either. The eventual solution may be to designate vital scientific pages as semi-protected so they can only be edited by science-administrators. I think that day will eventually arrive.

I may be able to do something about this page, but the general problem needs to be thought about. History2007 (talk) 01:02, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

It's been more than thought about, believe me. And not just regarding the hard sciences. My field, such as it is, is religion/philosophy, and I've found quite a few "misstatements" in those areas as well. But, as you indicated, there are comparatively few really expert editors in really any field, and the few there are are often overextended. When you find what you consider to be really serious problems, though, it generally would be useful to contact a related WikiProject where the people, with luck, will know something about the subject and be able to correct the problem. You can find a comparatively old one (I'm still working on the revision) at WP:PROJDIR and its various subpages. John Carter (talk) 01:08, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this is a classic example of the starfish story, cliched as that has become. I started out in 2004 by noticing that WP had abysmal coverage (with "glaring errors"!) of metal chlorides, so I got some good books and references then went ahead and wrote a whole series of articles over the next year. We all try and contribute where we can; the good articles you've seen were once just as bad as the set theory article! But one interesting result of adding solid content is that people of like mind often join you in writing more, the improvements occur more rapidly and a community develops. If you have a good knowledge of set theory, please improve this (very weak) article, then others from WP Mathematics will probably join you. As well, around 25,000 people a month will be grateful for your efforts, and if the article is improved, that number will grow a lot. So please do what you can! Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:01, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Well Martin, I was thinking of the best way to do that article but your starfish story started my tears... now putting away my Kleenex, I may be able to start again.... No seriously, please, please, please realize that some of us do not need a "25,000 fans a nanosecond" type of "one for the team" encouragement. I was going to edit that specific page out of respect for the topic and the work of Georg Cantor, not for the 25,000 long distance thank you notes. But I must say that there is an underlying trend among Wiki-people that amazes me: Most of them (yourself included) seem to believe in work, more than they believe in process automation and/or clever computers. So more man-power seems to be the suggested solution to all problems, as you suggested to me. The moto of most Wiki-people seems to be the same: "I will work harder, you do the same". I guess you know whose motto that was: Boxer.

Generally, I prefer processes that accelerate development, and have built in safeguards - not just raw manpower. E.g. a possible solution may be two tier pages, where every student can edit tier 2, but every 6 months an expert will move that content to tier 1. That way, experts do not feel that their effort may be wiped away in a second if they do not watch the page. And it takes major effort to watch pages. If Wikipedia is a "knowledge bank", there needs to be more control on the safety of the deposits.

Yet, amazingly Wikipedia still mostly works! When I Googled Boxer for a link (I read that book too long ago), the Wikipedia link came up and was the best link. So maybe Boxer was 30% right, but probably not 100% right. Yet there was an inconsistency on that page too. The Boxer page interprets his 2nd motto "is always right" differently from the book page. I wonder which one is correct.... History2007 (talk) 08:49, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Aha! If you're interested in processes to make things more efficient, this is definitely the place to come. We're a small group, but a lot goes on behind the scenes. If you doubt my commitment to automation, take a look at this list, where I've been involved in designing a formula for automating the article selection process. I'm also very committed to the idea of flagged revisions and having versions of articles fact-checked and (ideally) reviewed by experts. It's not exactly what you're proposing, but it achieves much of the same aims. In my area, chemistry, I'm pretty sure that all of the content I added in 2004-2005 is basically still there, and it's watched by many people besides myself. If you're interested in these issues, and you are willing to take the initiative, this editorial group is a good place to work. I would still say, however, that the words on the page have to be written, one at a time, and there's no substitute for that! Walkerma (talk) 14:40, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I think you will find version management to be more complicated than it appears. Such strategies were attempted for database control back in the early 1980's and there were a couple of PhDs on that topic at Stanford, but got nowhere. What will make a difference in my opinion is a piece of software that detects the degree of change a page has undergone and then notifies a user/expert based on specific conditions. Wikipedia already tries a simple version of this idea via a user initiated "minor change flag". This needs to be automated to take less work since the flag is visible only for the last change. To understand that this is totally possible to implement, take a simple website like Craigslist.org. They can detect if a post for selling an item is the old post that has a few words changed or not. And givn the section tags in Wikipages makes it even easier. That way, only for vital pages an expert gets notified if the page has undergone substantial change. And that does not need to be checked every minute, it can be checked every day/night, at a time when serverload is not too high. This type of clever computing then reduces work for the experts and turns them into less of Expert Boxer types who work too much.

I have enough other things to do that I can not sit down and write code for this right now. But if you know who the "chief algorithm designer" for Wikipedia is, you can suggest this and they may just be able to add it. The "key to success" here will be to anticipate their built in fear of server overload due to these computations and calm their nerves beforehand by pointing out that the computational costs are managable. This type of clever checking will eventually be done on most "community based systems" so Wikipedia may just start now. History2007 (talk) 21:09, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

NEWS: Wikipedia is really surprising. I just started editing the set theory article and suddenly (as one of you pedicted) people came out from the wood work and added a lot. So much so that there is now a question of mathematical gluttony and I think there will be too much on the page. But they seem to know the topic well and the page will probably be a reasonable page after all. This was an interesting e-social phenomenon. History2007 (talk) 21:32, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Discussion regarding 1.0 style matters

Some of you may be interested in the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Throwing several consensus-gathering projects into one basket, which deals with what if any stylistic and other matters regarding the print version should be addressed before that print version is made. John Carter (talk) 18:21, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks John, I wanted to make sure it didn't get trashed in the first few hours with "Noob, begone!" before I brought it up here. But yes, please do see it. I'm enthusiastic about Version 1.0, and I bring it up often. There is a kind of random, indistinct resistance to the idea of thinking about layout and look-and-feel issues when Wikipedia is printed, and I was thinking it would be best just to invite everyone to have their say, find out where there's consensus for layout issues, get approval for bots, and be done with it, so that it doesn't keep coming up in separate contexts on different style guideline pages. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 22:18, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

AAA?

Um, huh? "I notice you list AAA and BBB as interests, and there are plenty of articles in those areas that need reviewing!" - Dan Dank55 (talk) 21:35, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Factual review

Team members might be interested in factual review, a new system that I have proposed (and which I have received very little feedback on). — Thomas H. Larsen 08:23, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I gave you some feedback on this last month, and it looks like you've gotten good feedback from others. If people haven't participated, that may mean they're not going to, probably because there's already a well-attended project that does fact-checking: WP:FACT. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 13:11, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Quality statistics table

Could someone please look into including the following on the quality statistics table? - LA @ 07:49, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Category-Class

Image-Class

Template-Class

NA-Class

Any other classes not currently included

Has there been any movement on this issue? - LA @ 00:36, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't able to respond when this came in, so I missed it. These have been discussed, but the consensus has always been to try and keep the stats simple and stick only to mainspace pages. This is for two reasons: (a) We don't want the bot's code to get so complicated that it crashes or slows right down - it's kept very busy and a lot of people depend on it. (b) Some projects (including the 1.0 project that coordinates this) just use the basic classes, and they want to have a nice, concise little stats table. We recently added FL-Class and List-Class to help projects, and although these are mainspace there was still some opposition to including them. The code was written so that projects that don't use those classes don't get their stats tables cluttered up with blank rows. We now have some more help with the code writing, and this may help us deal with it. We should probably have an IRC discussion on this; I'll email a couple of people. In the meantime, if you want to pursue this further the best place to discuss this issue is at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index - but read through the recent discussions first. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 17:09, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:ILLINOIS

Does WP:ILLINOIS have a page similar to WP:CHICAGO's Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log? I ask because Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Illinois articles by quality log does not seem to exist.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 18:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It's at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 21:13, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Needed-Class article talk pages are being deleted

I tagged a few pages with a WikiProject banner and gave them the Needed-Class quality assessment. They have been deleted. I found them and asked the person who deleted them to restore them, however, there needs to be a way to keep this from happening again. To others who have used Needed-Class, you should check your Needed-Class articles categories, they may be all empty. - LA @ 00:35, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that; I think the WikiProject should make the decisions on how their banners are used (assuming basic protocols of course). Was the template itself deleted, or was the banner removed from the talk pages - can you explain? Walkerma (talk) 17:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Revamp of the assessment descriptions

Please see these proposals and comment there. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 18:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Hello from ITN team

Hello. Recently, there was a discussion about including deaths of prominent individuals in the ITN section on the Main page. One of the current proposals is to have a list of top important/prominent/notable people and if anyone from the list dies, he is mentioned in the templaet, otherwise not. In order not to create a list from a scratch, I turn to you, do you have anything appropriate? I have already asked the guys at biography wikiproject, they directed me here. Thanks for feedback, greetings. --Tone 20:36, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm the guy who directed him here. I think it could be a good idea. I'd try to include the Top and High importance blp's. That's about 48,000 articles, admittedly, but figuring at least half of those aren't living biographies, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get together a list of the blp articles and use that as a guide. John Carter (talk) 21:14, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

We do have this list which shows the biographical articles we have selected for Version 0.7 from WikiProject assessments, based on both importance and quality. We're still developing the algorithm, but if you like I could see if the bot could give you a list of articles with living=yes and an importance rank above 1000; this would probably give you a working list of perhaps a 1000-2000 important living people. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for? Walkerma (talk) 21:31, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

This would be a good beginning. Could you generate it so we can have a look? --Tone 10:33, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I will request this. Assuming it can be done, it will probably take at least a few days, I expect, since it will involve writing some code, testing, etc. How many entries do you want? We can set the cutoff anywhere you like. Walkerma (talk) 01:19, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Since the coding is more or less the same in each case, would it be hard to make a list of 500, 1000 and 2000? I suppose this algorithm will be useful for another tasks as well so I hope I am not giving you extra work :-) Thanks. --Tone 21:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Is it possible to get full recent changes for a project?

I'm wanting recent changes for U.S. road articles. There are 24 pages that list them all, but I tried including them all in one page and that page won't load or update. (Related changes shows only the template that I had to use to even make the page save at all.) If the templates were on the articles, a hidden category could be added, and related changes for the category could be used, but the templates are on the talk pages. Is there an easy way that I haven't thought of? --NE2 17:48, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you wanting more than the log? This tracks all assessment changes. If you want more, (in effect) to have something like a watchlist of all US Roads articles, then it may be possible to set up a bot to do that. For that purpose, you could ask User:Beetstra who wrote a similar bot for WP:CHEMS, which watches likely spam/vandalism articles from WP:CHEMS and reports any edits to those onto the chemistry IRC channel. Beetstra is very busy in real life right now, but he might share his code with someone who isn't. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 05:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm looking for something like Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people. --NE2 23:00, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I've generated a list of around 9000+ articles from the 24 "by quality" lists, usingWP:AWB (it was very quick to do). I've posted nearly all of them on your list page, and the recent changes works very well. However, the page is well over 200k long now, and it won't let me add any more (even small numbers); the remainder are in my sandbox at User:Walkerma/Sandbox2; I may try transcluding these in using subst. I'm working late, and I'll try again later when Wikipedia speeds up considerably. Tantalisingly close - the list is over 90% complete, but I can't get that last few % to load! One other small problem; a few characters seem to have been corrupted during the list generation, and these appear as squares in the lists and break the links. If this list is useful, you may be able to fix these by hand, but at least most articles are OK. I hope this meets your needs. Walkerma (talk) 02:27, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I tried that, and yeah, it didn't work. (I actually found all pages in the categories and converted from talk, which took a bit longer but is more definitely complete.) Did you open it in Wordpad? In Notepad I didn't get the Asian characters. It seems MediaWiki doesn't want to save a page with more than a certain number of links. I actually think I got it working by splitting it in two and using inclusion, but I don't know for sure that it didn't choke somewhere and it should ideally be simple to update. --NE2 06:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I used Wordpad. I don't think it's just Asian characters, though, it loses some of the square brackets too. As for getting a page short enough to load properly, I'm wondering if it can be done by having two or three sub-pages linked to from the /all articles page, and then you check that little box that says "Show changes to pages linked to the given page instead." I'm very busy with "real life" work right now, or I'd try it myself - do you think that could work? Walkerma (talk) 15:25, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

That show changes for everything that links to a page: [1] --NE2 23:43, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Needed class

There is a deletion discussion at CfD Category:Needed-Class articles which asserts that "needed-class articles" is supported by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team as one of the Category:Articles by quality. Please comment at that deletion discussion. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 20:52, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Space

Space is listed as a vital article by this project, so members might be interested in commenting at Talk:Space, where a suggestion has been made to split the article and turn it into a disambiguation page. Hiding T 22:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Chicago stats

The Chicago project stats were only produced five times in April and have not been produced since the 23rd. Can we get it to run every two or three days.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 07:28, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Hey i concur with Tony, Wikiproject Lebanon's stats haven't been updated since the date he mentioned. Is there a bot glitch? Eli+ 22:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll ask CBM. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:36, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Naming

I don't think the project should be called Wikipedia 1.0 since later versions would have to be 2.0 3.0 so on, and that seems to imply major changes to the software/medium of presentation. Instead it should be called Wikipedia 2008 or whatever year for which it will be released. 24.5.246.233 (talk) 16:28, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

New version of Igor

Igor 0.2.0 is available, and it includes a number of features that may be useful to the members of the team, including a Wikiproject Browser and some task-force support. If you have the time, please download it and take it for a little test drive. I'm always open to suggestions, so by all means let me have it! The next release (0.3.0) will be a quick one, so if they're fairly simple ones, they may make it into that version. Many thanks! – ClockworkSoul 04:24, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Votes on changing the assessment scale

We're considering putting A below GA, and adding a C-Class between Start and B. Please choose your favourite option here. Walkerma (talk) 05:35, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Assessments table

If a project is not in 1.0, can an assessments table still be generated? --Una Smith (talk) 15:45, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

The way it works is that when you tag the article talk pages with the project template, then they automatically become part of the 1.0 system (assuming that the template and categories have been set up). However, that doesn't need to affect anything you do at the project. There is no way to generate a table unless the articles are tagged and the categories made. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 15:57, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Request for assessment table

Please help I have spent a couple of hours setting up Wikipedia:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith and I'm still a little new at assessment and banners and what-have-you. If anyone has some spare time, could you take a look at {{WikiProject Bahá'í Faith}} and Wikipedia:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith/Assessment to see if I can get one of these assessment tables generated? Please respond on my talk or the talk for the WikiProject. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:42, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

OK, after checking Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot, I added Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments to the "...articles by quality" page. Now you just need to wait 2-3 days and the bot should generate tables and a log for you. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 03:27, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so much This is very helpful. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:38, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Still waiting? It's still not working; is there anything I can do to help generate it? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

date autoformatting is optional

I'd like to remind members of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.

There are four advantages in not linking dates:

1. Inconsistent raw formatting within an article is obvious to editors and thus less likely to escape our attention. (The autoformatting mechanism conceals the inconsistencies from us, the very people who are most likely to enforce consistency, but the raw formats are displayed in bright blue to almost all readers, who are not registered and logged in. The rules for the choice of format in an article are in MOSNUM, here); they are easily summarised as (a) be consistent within an article; (b) take account of national ties to a topic; and (c) retain the existing format unless there's a good reason not to.
2. There are fewer bright-blue splotches in the text, which makes it slightly easier to read and improves its appearance.
3. The following issues concerning the dysfunctional aspects of the autoformatting mechanism do not arise:
   • piped links to date elements ([[20 June|20]], [[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function);
   • links to date ranges in the same calendar month e.g. December 13–17 or the night of 30/31 May – the autoformatting mechanism will damage such dates (30/May 31);
   • links to date elements on disambiguation pages;
   • links to date elements in article and section headings; and
   • links to date elements in quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
4. As a minor advantage, edit windows are slightly easier to read and edit.

It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. TONY (talk) 14:06, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

C-Class assessments not working with the MathBot?

Hi, I was setting up the assessment mechanisms this morning for the Catullus WikiProject, and I noticed that the new C-Class assessments are not being counted by the MathBot. They turn up as "Unassessed" instead. It's possible that I made a mistake in setting up the template, but if not, could this be fixed, please? Thanks, all! :) Willow (talk) 19:05, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

The bot is picking up C-Class articles now, so I'm betting it is something having to do with the template. I'll look at it. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:27, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it works as already coded. I'm not sure what happened to cause it to recognize articles as unassessed. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:40, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Since Category:C-Class Catullus articles is empty, the bot does not add its row in the stats table. This kind of behavior was agreed on a while ago. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:35, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Replied at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index. Thanks, all! :) Willow (talk) 11:26, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Any suggestions on how to get these assessments into the table of Oregon-related articles?? I added a blank row to the table, not sure if this is necessary or if it's enough to get the bot's attention. (I made the project's first couple of C assessments yesterday.) Thanks for any help! - Pete (talk) 17:35, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the bot hasn't passed through the Oregon project since July 2, but the assessments were done on July 5 & 6. I keep the log pages of my WikiProjects on my watchlist so I can see when the updates happen - check back after the next bot update. If there's still a problem, let us know, but I've been told that C-Class is generally working fine now. Walkerma (talk) 03:47, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Missing articles and WikiProjects?

I was delighted with the coverage you all got in the Signpost this week! :) I noticed, though, in your trial index, that some articles and even whole WikiProjects seemed to be missing, e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics. Is there perhaps a glitch in the assessments? Willow (talk) 20:22, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

(I thought I'd already posted my reply to this - sorry about that!) The trial index was based on lists compiled in February, and so if the WP:Electronics list wasn't part of the system at that time it would have been missed. We will be doing a lot of work on the Selection Bot starting in a week or so, and I'll be sure to check that WP:Electronics shows up! Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:58, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia and School CD-Roms

Last night I was talking to User:Vassyana on Skype and he supports an idea I have that would benefit schools around the United States and a later time, international schools. What I want to do is spearhead a project that would benefit schools by giving them CD-ROMs about the area they live in. If you're confused, lemme show you an example:

• • Syracuse, New York:

A Syracuse topic would include some to all of the towns around it, with a detailed history about the towns and give them a better idea where they live. The twelve Finger Lakes would also be a good addition.

This idea is basically a proposal to help rural schools (who don't have the best of updated books and such) and some suburban schools that fall under the same policy. If Wikipedia is able to do this, it would be a big benefit to schools in the U.S. Please reply, as this is a great proposal IMO.Mitch32 09:53, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Addendum: If people agree with this, I will look into the ideas and a drive in what to put together and gas up the production.Mitch32^(UP) 14:11, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea. I think we're reaching the point where we can do this sort of thing quite easily. You should collaborate with this group, as well as Wikipedia:WikiProject New York, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikislice. You may also want to talk to User:BozMo, who has done two offline releases for schools (see the 2007 release. You could perhaps include all of BozMo's articles (for some kid-friendly general knowledge), and then get Syracuse/geographical related articles from the following lists (which will be expanded and updated next month):

• [2]
• [3]
• [4]

If you have enough interest in a specific city (e.g., Syracuse), can I suggest that you start a page to coordinate things? You could do that as a page off the New York WikiProject if they support it, or do it off the 1.0 site if necessary. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 16:21, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

This is not just for NY. This would be, at first, for the whole country. If it is possible, I would like to spearhead a committee &/or campaign to work on articles and have them produced on CD-ROMs and then shipped to correct schools.Mitch32^(UP) 17:22, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I understand - I simply gave these as an example. Also, you'd probably want a pilot city to try out first. I think you'll find that pretty much all of the US states have WikiProjects, and many of the larger cities have their own too. I'd recommend involving them if you can. Linterweb would be happy to produce the CDs with an offline reader, if there is someone to pay for them. And you'd need to have contacts in the educational system who would coordinate things with the schools - it would probably be BOCES in New York State (FYI, I live only about 120 miles from Syracuse!), but I'm sure there are similar organizations elsewhere. Walkerma (talk) 06:09, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

This project has been started at Wikipedia:Wikimedia School Team Geoff Plourde (talk) 22:11, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

As Mitch mentions above, I talked with him about the idea and I think it's a very solid proposal. There are plenty of rural and urban school districts that have limited and/or out-of-date classroom materials that could benefit from such a project. It would also be a real-world education application of Wikipedia, which would be of benefit to the project, particularly with feedback from educators about the materials provided. Vassyana (talk) 23:16, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Arkanasas template

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arkansas articles by quality statistics is not showing the importance of the articles, could someone fix this? --Chetblong^Talk/_ARK 03:52, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Hopefully this change should fix it. Check after the bot makes its next update (see the log and let us know if the importance still fails to appear. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Help please.

Can someone take a look at this and fix it? I can't figure out the problem. It here:Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arena Football League articles by quality statistics. Thanks, Crash Underride 15:57, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Can you explain what the problem is? Everything looks fine to me! Walkerma (talk) 14:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality log has not run since June 2nd and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log has not run since June 3rd. Both are too large for me to run them by hand.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 11:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I was alarmed at first, but I see from the logs you meant July 2nd and 3rd, not June! I suspect this delay is probably a result of the new C-Class, and the resultant flurry of assessment activity. Since the speed of the bot depends a lot on the change in the listings, it's probably a case of a lot of changes => a long time between bot runs. The bot does seem to be running normally, and it looks like others have the same problem (last run July 2nd as I look at it now), so I suspect that we may just have to be patient during this transition. I'll update you here if it looks like it will be a serious problem. Walkerma (talk) 14:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, a closer look at the log, at the last 500, does show the bot stopping and starting. I'll try and find what's up. Walkerma (talk) 14:33, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Any word?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:11, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Maintainence issue: Redirects

So the new C-class inspired me to go through the lists looking for candidates, and I found a significant problem: Redirects, still with assessment templates on their talk pages. So I went through the WP:VG list and found well over a thousand redirects marked as stubs. While I'd like to take a moment to encourage editors to remove assessment templates when merging and/or redirecting, I'd also like to suggest that it could also be relegated to bot work. It doesn't need to be frequent, but a spring-cleaning of our lists every so often would keep our article counts from inflating too much. Nifboy (talk) 19:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean exactly? Like replacing class=Ga, and class=ga by class=GA across all templates? Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 21:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

No, I mean pages like these, where the article has been redirected but the talk page and assessments have been left intact, so the redirect still shows up as an article in the 1.0 lists. I've been going through and removing the project templates by hand, something a bot can do. Nifboy (talk) 22:49, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I have been doing these also, by hand, for the last week. Seems like good work for a bot. --Paleorthid (talk) 06:05, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The main WP 1.0 bot can't do such work, it would require downloading one-by-one and searching through more than a million assessed articles and figuring out which are redirects. I think CBM has some scripts for querying directly the replicated database on the toolserver to find out the redirects. Try asking him on his talk page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I introduced a redirect class for this reason at the comics project.It allows tracking and better visibility. I don;t think it interferes with what you do here, either. Hiding T 09:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

A-Class review

What are the steps involved in setting up an A-class review for a project like WP:CHICAGO. We have a ton of Category:GA-Class Chicago articles that need help getting to Category:FA-Class Chicago articles.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

B-class colour not changed on articles by quality

See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Devon articles by quality/1, where the the B-class appears yellow. It should be green. bsrboy (talk) 20:44, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

I was away when your earlier post came in. I think the bot writers may need to fix this, so I replied here. Walkerma (talk) 21:13, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

WP:CITIES

The WP 1.0 Bot needs to be fixed. It is not putting WP:CITIES C-class articles in new categories, doesn't list C-class in the table, and puts all C-class articles in the unassessed class for the wikiproject. If someone could fix that, it would be great! Thanks! Dr. Cash (talk) 15:41, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

There doesn't appear to be any articles in Category:C-Class WikiProject Cities articles. If you can find a C-class WPCITIES article, I'll try and fix the problem. There may be a problem wih the talk page banner. bsrboy (talk) 15:49, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I think the problem is that the Template:WPCities template is putting the C-class articles into the unassessed category, instead of the C-class category. I can't edit the page since a sysop just protected it on july 10, so someone else is going to have to fix it. Dr. Cash (talk) 18:45, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

I had a look at the template. The C-class isn't included in it, so I made another version of the temlate in Template:WPCities/Sandbox, which should work. Ask a sysop to copy and paste what's in the sandbox onto the template. Hope it works! bsrboy (talk) 18:50, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

I fixed it for you. Should work. -Djsasso (talk) 19:28, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Yep, thanks! bsrboy (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Will take a few minutes for all the previously classed articles to shift over though. -Djsasso (talk) 19:32, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Dr. Cash (talk) 21:13, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, why always assume it's bot's fault? :) Unless more than one project reports the same problem, the problem is usually with the project in question. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:30, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

DWIM. Nifboy (talk) 05:43, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Assessment Chart

How do i get this chart to include the classes: list, features list, category, and template. They have all been added to the project, and have articles classified as such, but don't appear on the chart. Also, when does it update? Grk1011 (talk) 20:13, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

C-Class problem

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality log is not handling C-class. It is counting them as no class even though Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality statistics is counting them correctly, I believe.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:31, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

This is odd. I went to check the WikiProject Chicago banner to find that it uses Template:WPBannerMeta, so maybe it's an error in there or the bot. 86.29.138.203 (talk) 00:57, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

The problem is actually that {{WikiProject Illinois}} doesn't use WPBannerMeta, and it had not been converted to recognise C-Class categories. I've converted the banner to WPBannerMeta, which should fix the problem. Happy‑melon 13:36, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks it is working fine.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:21, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

IRC discussion on Version 0.7

We are hoping to get Version 0.7 together in the next month or so, with a plan to publish this fall, so we need to hold an IRC meeting with the French publisher (Linterweb). I expect we will have more IRC discussions in the coming months. Please sign up if you plan to attend, and add any agenda items you think need covering.

• Channel: #wikipedia-1.0
• Time: Monday, August 11th at 1900h UTC (3pm EDT, 2100h CET)
• Duration: Maximum of two hours; any business remaining after two hours will be held over till the next meeting.

Agenda

We will try to get through as much of the following as possible; please stay on-topic!

• Scope of the release.
• Status of SelectionBot, which is picking articles for Version 0.7.
• Writing an index of articles, based on a WikiProject "tree".
• Choosing a vandalism-free version of each article, and use of cleanup scripts.
• Status of Kiwix as an offline search engine.
• Copyright issues
• Cover art
• Pressing the DVDs
• Distribution (website, Amazon etc, Wal-Mart etc.)

Attendees

• Walkerma (talk) 16:51, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• Rgaudin (talk) 17:17, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• User:Dank55 17:23, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• Kelson (talk) 17:32, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 21:11, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• Tntnet (talk) 21:22, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
• Nominaladversary (talk) 19:27, 6 September 2008 (UTC) (Perhaps, I have school.)

Improvements to the WP 1.0 bot under discussion

Hi, all. As we know, the Version 1.0 Index stores assessments for over 1.7 million articles. Originally, the bot was designed to process about 10,000 articles; we never actually thought that 70% of Wikipedia was going to be covered under some sort of assessment. That has slowly caused the bot to take longer to run, as bot runs that used to last about four hours now take about four days. To make the bot more efficient, changes to the way the bot framework operates are being discussed, and simultaneously, we are discussing which features it might be worthwhile to add as we are recoding everything. We really would like to have your participation at User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation and its talk page as we do this. Thanks, Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 17:13, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log not running again

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log has not run since the 13th.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 16:23, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

It has not run since the 24th.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:53, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I think CBM is away for the holiday weekend, but I notice that the bot is still working hard; if it's still not reached Chicago by Tuesday, we'll see if there is something wrong. Walkerma (talk) 01:23, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Good - looks like it ran later on the 31st. Walkerma (talk) 20:41, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

It has been six days again.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 03:55, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

You'll get a better response to this issue at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment, which focuses on the technical aspects of the assessment scale. This page is for discussion of the 1.0 project as a whole, of which the quality assessments are only a small part. (also)Happy‑melon 12:11, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

FAR listing

Law has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. -- Vision Thing -- 18:42, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This is not a good place to post listings like this: you'd be much better off going to involved wikiprojects or active editors. The editorial team tend to work on much more abstract levels than individual articles. Happy‑melon 18:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Version 0.7 and One Laptop Per Child: IRC discussion

The folks over at One Laptop Per Child are interested in using Version 0.7 as the starting point for a collection used in Anglophone countries for the One Laptop Per Child project. We want to make sure that they have access to our work, and also that we might benefit from tools and experience they have.

• Channel: #kiwix
• Time: Friday, August 29, 2008 at 1900h UTC (3pm EDT, 2100h CET).

Please join us! Walkerma (talk) 22:21, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Fictional series clean up

The following three pages can be deleted, since WikiProject Fictional series no longer exists, or should I just list these at MfD? LA (T) @ 22:13, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality log

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality statistics

Style questions

I have a lot of questions about how we're going to proceed with style guidelines and copyediting between now and WP 1.0. Opinions welcome at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Groan. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:51, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's the gist of it. As I've said, 30000 articles on an official Wikipedia DVD is going to cause problems. Our competitors are going to pick out the worst bits and represent that as being "typical" of Wikipedia, and we're not going to have our usual defense available of saying that it was "work in progress" or "vandalized"; no one's going to believe that we didn't put our best work on our DVD. I don't think we're going to be happy with the news stories in the days after the DVD comes out. I'm really hoping that we have a chance to copyedit all 30000 articles at least once before WP 1.0. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:47, 9 September 2008 (UTC) Strikeout of objections that have been addressed. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:01, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I've been pondering your comments since last night. I do think that the Version 0.7 selection, for which we have a provisional list here, will in fact show mainly our best work. Most in the selection are B-Class or better, and the Start-Class entries are on "must-have" topics (where it would be embarrassing to omit the topic!). There are three things involved that relate to your comments:

1. The articles we pick. The above link shows something close to our final selection. Personally, I think it would be hard to get a better selection of that size. And we need that size - last time the only criticism was for the small size, not over quality, and our publisher really wants the larger size (since it's what everyone wants).
2. The versions OF those articles. That is much harder to handle. We can aim to pick versions from non-anon editors, and other basic precautions, but a certain amount of vandalism will creep in. We have scripts that look for "bad words", they will help. We have BozMo's latest selection of around 6000, these are recent and they have been hand-curated, so they should be excellent. We can ask WikiProjects to give us good versions (flagged revisions?!) of the selected articles within their particular areas - that will help a lot, if they participate (I expect we can give them a month or so).
3. The cleanup of those articles. That is a process that will only begin in a focused way this week - once the proposed final selection has been listed for everyone. That will shine a light on specific articles, and in some cases I can see a project scrambling to improve a key article that has slipped under their radar previously. But that process can only happen slowly - hence your concern.

I think we have to declare that this is only Version 0.7, not Version 1.0, and as such we don't have a 100% foolproof system. There will be errors. But hopefully, there will be only a handful of problem articles, and no real "bloopers". In Version 0.5, we only had scripts, but amazingly I heard no reports of serious errors in the 2000 articles. This time we have a better, though imperfect, system. Regarding quality, I think most of the media are familiar with Wikipedia article quality, and if we produce a selection that is pretty much free from "Bush is gay LOL" then we will have something to be proud of. In the meantime, any ideas for scripts, methods, tricks etc that can reduce the problems will be very welcome here! (And BTW, I really appreciate you taking on this aspect of the release.) Walkerma (talk) 04:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm happy to help. If I go on too much about this, and then it turns out there's no reaction from the media or our competitors, it will sound like I was "crying wolf", so let's wait and see what the reaction is. I would be in favor of giving the wikiprojects more time to review their work, and letting them know that copyeditors are available if they want them. This is, of course, no criticism of your work, Martin. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 11:14, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

• Is there a list of articles that need copyediting? Hiding T 12:15, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

We would really like to get a release done this fall; if we don't, we will be criticised for having lost our way. It doesn't matter too much if it comes out in November or even December, but next year would be too late. However, we will certainly give the projects as long as possible to work on cleanup. Hiding, for now there is no list, but there we could probably generate one. I will ask CBM if it's possible for us to get a specific list of selected articles with cleanup tags, so we can focus our efforts on those. In the meantime, if you want to work on copyedits, you could take a look at the main list - selected articles are in bold. Find a subject area where you feel comfortable, and look through the Start and C-Class articles. Thanks for offering to help! Walkerma (talk) 15:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

No problem. Who is a good person to coach me? By which I mean a go to guy/gal for questions. I promise I am a fast learner. ;) Hiding T 10:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Many FAC and GAN reviewers have good copyediting skills, but in general, they want to keep doing what they're doing. I'm going to ask some to share copyediting tips that would be relevant to B-class articles and see what we can get. Hiding, I'll be happy to help you; pick an article, make some changes, ask me some questions, and I'll look at it when you're finished to see if I can add anything. For the purposes of 0.7, don't worry about punctuation (unless it's something that bothers you), but fixing even simple things like misspellings would help a lot. Concentrate on the articles or wikiprojects you care about from the article selection Martin mentioned just above. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:33, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Okay. I have some template work to finish up, so I'll try and make a start next week if that's okay? Hiding T 13:15, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Replied at your talk page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:24, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Copyediting minifesto

• All professional publishing uses copyeditors. Publishers and writers are less than honest about this.
• Copyediting adapts writing to look right to as wide an audience as possible, and it's also about a lot of stupid little things (like punctuation) that trick the reader into thinking that what's being written is good stuff by giving it the same look-and-feel as other good stuff.
• You're not a good copyeditor until at least 100 people have told you that you're a crappy copyeditor.
• Copyediting is not optional when you have competitors who are looking for ways to tear you down. Good writers stay positive; good copyeditors think defensively. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:21, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

0.7 Sweeps

[inserted] On the other hand, we don't have time to copyedit 28000 articles before 0.7 goes out the door in (I'm guessing) December, we only have time to look at the articles that haven't gotten enough attention and flag them for minor changes if they need it. I'll have more details later today. One conclusion I hope everyone comes to during the sweeps is that it would be great to get some level of copyediting applied to all the articles before Version 0.8 (maybe?) goes out next December (maybe?). - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:31, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree with this - I'm a great fan of the copyeditor, and we have too few good copyeditors on WP. If the copyeditors we have are willing to get involved, then I would be delighted, though I know they in great demand at GAN and FAC. Would you be willing to set up a sub-project of the WP:1.0 team to coordinate this? We need someone who is committed to the 1.0 project AND to copyediting, and who can persuade others to join him/her. We have a review team that people sign up for, so I think we could have a similar copyediting team. I don't want to delay the release of 0.7 over this, because we can't realistically get 30,000 articles copyedited to perfection in that timeline, but I think we can try to identify the articles that need the most help and focus on those. I'll ask about a bot to write such a list. And if we have a coordinated campaign, we CAN get the full set of 30,000 articles up to a good standard for the next release (probably fall 2009). And not have too many sentences beginning with And. Many thanks, Walkerma (talk) 21:40, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Let me see if I understand the position correctly, per our conversation today. Long hours? No pay? Lots of pressure? Perfect, I accept. People have already started asking me questions ... Sept wanted to know what to do about a couple of articles ... and I've been asking around, and I haven't gotten any answers yet. But I do have more questions: how do we deal with maintenance tags? How do we then deal with the fact that some people may slap maintenance tags on an article to try to keep it out of the DVD? Can we ask the wikiprojects to pick their own copyeditors? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:08, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

(Updated) Malleus, Tony, Sept and others (see WT:MOS) are pessimistic about our chances of success with 0.7. (Now that I have a job, I don't have an opinion on this; it might compromise my ability to support whatever we wind up doing.) It would be very helpful if we could attract the attention of 10 or 15 copyeditors experienced at GAN and/or FAC for a couple of months, but if they believe the project is going to be embarrassing, they're not going to help us out. I will keep asking around, and I will report the results. I'm not clear what you're saying about not holding up 0.7, Martin, you were talking about November or December above; is there any update on what kind of drop-dead date we're looking at? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:04, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

My qualms, for what it is worth, are about Names of the Greeks and Alexander Hamilton, both of which have moderate to severe content problems (the first also shows all too clearly that it was not written by native speakers). Those are the two articles I have seen in the 0.7 list that I have much personal knowledge of, which does not encourage me about the others. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:55, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Although I've been spending most of my time on style guidelines and at WP:FAC, for the purposes of 1.0, I'd rather not focus on FAs like Names of the Greeks, although I'm perfectly happy for other people to point out problems. I'm more concerned with the articles that no one who calls themselves a copyeditor has ever seen. Alexander Hamilton is way over the WP:SIZE limit, so I don't want to read the whole thing, but coincidentally, someone just told me today that it has problems; thanks for bringing it up. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:43, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Try and read Names before you dismiss it; it has seriously decayed since it passed, and 2005 had looser standards anyway. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't mean it's not bad, I mean that there are already review processes in place for FAs and GAs. Until we put 0.7 to bed, I'm concerned about the other 20000 articles. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:37, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Will FARC get it out of 0.7? If so, what will get Alexander Hamilton out of it? - it isn't a FA or GA or likely to be. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:01, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

• Is this characteristic of the copyediting we are going to get? If so, I doubt you need worry so much about getting it done; this sample left the article no better than it found it. Some flaws have been fixed; some indifferent matters have complied with the sillier sections of MOS; other and more serious flaws, especially the emdashes which convert qualifying phrases into parentheticals - thus affecting content - have been introduced to balance them. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:11, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I replied privately to Sept. Maralia's edits improved the article, but while I was reading, I had a question. When we're doing article sweeps for 0.7, is it helpful to make a lot of changes that might move the article in the direction of GAN, on the theory that that's a win for everyone? (A win for the article, and a win for the GAN process, and especially, a win for us when it becomes someone else's problem!) Or should we leave what people might regard as "MOS fixes" alone and just fix the missing words and spelling? (Of course, we can't and shouldn't stop people from caring about an article, and fixing anything they want to fix. I'm asking about the goals of the 0.7 sweeps.) - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:30, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

• Another question: Martin has proposed that, for each page that's associated with at least one relevant wikiproject, we let the wikiproject make the decision whether they like our "swept" (i.e. quickly reviewed) version or a later version better. Is this acceptable to everyone?
• Martin says his preferred last possible deadline is mid(ish) December. I propose that, whatever it is we're doing during our sweeps, we come up with a guess of how many articles "we" want to sweep. (I don't know who "we" is, and I don't think we need a sign-up sheet, but I'm not talking about the folks who review for GAs, FAs, and specific wikiproject review processes. They're all busy and productive and what they're doing helps 0.7 a lot, although I have started asking them to make themselves available for copyediting and other questions.) If the number of articles we have to cover is 9000, then that's around 3000 a month. I propose that we come up with a guess for what we can expect to do with 3000 articles in a month, then try to do it, and one month later, roughly October 15, we stop, and see how far we got. If we only covered 1500 articles, then we need to put the deadline off to March or later ... I believe consensus is that it's not acceptable to have articles discussing donkey dongs, so each article has to be read quickly once by somebody. When we've got the first third covered, I propose we hand the list (and a list of the specific versions we looked at) to the Communications Committee (ComCom). If they think the quality of the results is bad enough that it would embarrass editors and/or hurt Wikipedia, I think we should listen and go back and do a better job; it's their job to make judgment calls concerning the public perception of Wikipedia. If they're happy, we're good. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:06, 12 September 2008 (UTC) Strikeout of concerns that have been addressed. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:09, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
• Another proposal is that we give sweepers discretion to do what seems right to them. Yes, we're mainly concerned with donkey dongs, and with meeting deadlines, and if there's time, with spelling errors and bad grammar, but if a sweeper thinks an article should be downgraded and/or removed from the selection and wants to talk about that, I'd be happy to look at the article and talk about that. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:18, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Update

I understand that we're now looking at a shorter deadline, sometime in October. We can't possibly get everything done that we might want to do, but that's what makes it fun. I propose that we concentrate on identifying the pages among the 28000 that have gotten the least attention so far, and if there are problems on those pages, marking the last version that didn't have the problems. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 15:36, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we need this work to be completed by October, in order to get the DVDs produced and distributed by December. Sorry if I caused any misunderstanding. Walkerma (talk) 17:53, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

My mistake ... when you mentioned December, I thought that was a deadline for us, but you were talking about the guys putting together the DVD. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:32, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

October the 1st or the 31st? I'll try and make a start tomorrow. My expertise, such as it is, is in comics articles, so I'll probably look over those. Hiding T 13:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

We're aiming for October 20th. The list of Comics articles needing most help is now available here (updated every hour). Thanks! Walkerma (talk)

Oh. My. God. What are you after? A good version in the page history or a good current version. I can clean them up, but I'm not sure how long before a cleaned up version would be reverted back to a "preferred version". Based on the top two we're looking at complete rewrites. Hiding T 12:16, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Whenever you get a version you like, paste the url for that edit at User:SelectionBot/0.7; then it doesn't matter if someone reverts you. If it's too much to get done, operators are standing by at WT:1C; there haven't been any requests for help yet other than mine. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:09, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Version numbering scheme

I see the first version was 0.5, the next will be 0.7, and the "official" one will be 1.0, but I wonder why you chose not to follow a more reasonable version numbering scheme, ie name the first test release 0.1, then 0.2, 0.3, ... until 1.0. This way, with 0.5 and 0.7, people may assume that there was a 0.1 or a 0.6 release. NerdyNSK (talk) 20:54, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd support calling the next release 0.8. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:33, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

IIRC, it was because we were going to have a test release (v0.5) before the "real" release (v1.0), but then we pretty much saw that the processes we were using to select articles were not going to scale, so we decided to have another test release (v0.7) using the newer processes. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 21:36, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

As an outsider that matches my memory. Hiding T 12:06, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

0.7 isn't a fork of WP, it's a snapshot. Since Wikipedia is a work in progress, any snapshot of it is a work in progress, so IMO, 0.8 would be a better name for next fall's DVD than 1.0, which sounds like a finished product. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:56, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

What are the priority articles for v 0.7?

As far as I can see neither Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team nor the automated selection notices, e.g. this one for chess, give any guidance on which articles should receive highest priority in improvement efforts for v 0.7. This applies equally to other subject areas in which I'm active, e.g. Paleontology, Biology, Dinosaurs. If you can provide guidance / criteria, please state whether you will distribute guidance automatically or whether I should post a link to this discussion at the Wikiprojects in which I'm interested. -- Philcha (talk) 12:22, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

It probably makes sense to try to fix the things that look worst, so look at the lower-rated articles first, and skim each article for any obvious vandalism or nonsense. Anything you won't have time to do yourselves, list at WT:1C. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:08, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

The automated selection notices direct projects to the list of selected articles needing cleanup, I think that's the page you're looking for. However for chess, it looks as if the project has done such a great job and there are NO selected chess articles needing cleanup, and amazingly biology has only four (we have far more in chemistry/chemicals!), but it would be great if you could work on those. Re palaeontology, see the post below. Walkerma (talk) 22:16, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Surprising absence of selection notice

I've just checked Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Palaeontology and am surprised to see that it has no v 0.7 selection notice. There are articles which fall under WikiProject Palaeontology but not under any of its descendant WikiProjects, e.g Kimberella and Opabinia (both GA and High importance). I mention thse two only as examples, not because I'm pushing for their inclusion. My concern is that there may be a hole in the v 0.7 selection and notification net, and for example some WikiProjects may not be aware of which articles have the highest priority for improvement efforts. -- Philcha (talk) 12:42, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

I think I found the problem; Palaeontology is not being picked up as part of the 1.0 scheme, and it doesn't appear in our main list. When the assessment system was set up for that project, it didn't get put into the 1.0 project, but I think I just fixed that. We'll have to see how we can get the numbers just for palaeontology. Thanks for flagging this. Walkerma (talk) 22:07, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Glad I could help. Palaeontology was the itch I really wanted to scratch in the preceding thread, but the lack of a "hit list" for paleo gave me less to work on. It's quite a severe itch, look at the state of Palaeontology! I think I can get that up to B-class quickly - after that reviewers will be a bottleneck as the best editors will be busy cleaning up articles in their own pet subject areas. -- Philcha (talk) 11:06, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Oops, just checked Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Palaeontology and it still has no v 0.7 selection notice. I picked up the inclusion of Palaeontology from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Dinosaurs, and the article's High importance, low rating and high visitor hit rate got my attention. I don't know if the lack of a seletion notice at WikiProject Palaeontology constitutes a major hole, that's for you guys to decide. -- Philcha (talk) 11:13, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I don't think there's any point in posting the notice until we have the selection, and that has to wait until we can run the SelectionBot again - hopefully this weekend. Now the category is fixed and the first bot picked up the project, but it takes about a week for all the bots to work through all the iterations and sequences. I'll do a manual post if necessary as soon as we get the selection. Walkerma (talk) 01:42, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

IRC next week?

Shall we have an IRC meeting next week to discuss Version 0.7? Would 2000h UTC on Monday (1600h EDT, 2200h Central European Summer Time) be good for people? Walkerma (talk) 22:20, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Yep. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:05, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, from emails it sounds like at least a handful of us will be there, so let's meet (informally, at least):

Channel: #wikipedia-1.0

Time: Monday, September 21st at 2000h UTC (4pm US Eastern Daylight Time, 2200h Central European Summer Time)

Agenda :Whatever we need to talk about with Version 0.7 - the addendum, the VersionID work, the merging of manual vs bot selections, the copyediting campaign, the index, etc.

Talk to you tomorrow, Walkerma (talk) 00:42, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I think it's 3:00 pm EST? Gary King (talk) 01:02, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but the US is still on EDT, where it's 4pm. I have to teach till 4pm here in upstate New York, so it had better be! Right now I'm four hours behind UTC. Walkerma (talk) 01:30, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

On wiki list?

Is there an on wiki list of the selected articles anywhere? I'm really concerned about a lot of the Comics articles, almost all of them are articles on characters, and I'm wondering what we're looking at regarding selection bias. Do we want to lean heavily on pop culture? Hiding T 10:15, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

WP0.7 duplicate SelectionBot listings

I've noticed that if an article chosen for 0.7 has two WikiProject banners, there are two SelectionBot listings. I'm a member of the Video games WikiProject, which has a rather large scope and many subprojects. As a result, we have a significant number of these cases. The main VG project listing is found on User:SelectionBot/0.7/V-3#Video game, but those in the PlayStation project are also listed at User:SelectionBot/0.7/P-4#PlayStation, Final Fantasy articles are at User:SelectionBot/0.7/F-2#Final_Fantasy, Nintendo articles at User:SelectionBot/0.7/N-2#Nintendo and so on. What is the preferred method for handling these? Should we put a note on one directing to the other, like "See User:SelectionBot/0.7/V-3#Video game"? Should we put the same oldid selection on both? Should we remove one of the two? I'd like to do something to avoid an oldid mismatch between the two listings—please let me know what would work best for your team. Thanks, Pagrashtak 14:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we've been wrestling with these kinds of issues all summer. If you have closely related task forces, then it might be good to post the preferred VersionID on all of the task force VersionID lists, if you have time; that would save another task force duplicating your effort. I think we were saying that if we get more than one VersionID for the same article, then we would just take the latest one, but if there's time we could look at the diff to see if it looks OK. Our French collaborator has some ideas for coding into the template a preferred versionID for a particular release, and that being read automatically into a system; alternatively, we may end up using Flagged Revisions if that is enabled. But till then, we'll have to list these manually, though I'll raise it at our IRC meeting on Monday. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 15:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Alright, for now I'll have the VG editors cross post the oldids. The Nintendo project used to be a stand-alone WikiProject, but has recently been converted into a task force. Their project banner has been removed from article talk pages and replaced with a parameter in {{WikiProject Video games}}. For a case like this, would it be useful to verify that the articles are already represented under the VG section and remove the Nintendo section? If I understand it, SelectionBot wouldn't create that section today, since the banner is no longer in use. Pagrashtak 16:45, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Having VG editors cross post sounds great, thanks! With task forces, we have a list of whether or not projects giving their task forces the ability to rate importance. Some like Military History never do, and some like Australia usually do; can you tell me what the policy is for WP:VG?

If the template means that an article appears on both lists always (say, WP:VG and WP:Nintendo), as is usual, AND you only have the parent's importance ranking, then you can always delete the task force list. That's because the task force is ranked lower than the parent and will never contain articles that aren't also in the parent. If the template does not automatically tag the article for the parent project as well (we have a handful of those), then be careful! I hope that makes sense! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 18:45, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

VG task forces are handled with a simple tf=param parameter in the VG banner. They are rated for VG importance, but there is no importance rating in terms of the task force. When Nintendo was converted to a task force, their rating categories such as Category:FA-Class Nintendo articles and Category:Top-importance Nintendo articles were deleted. From your comment, it sounds like I can remove the Nintendo SelectionBot section as long as I make sure those articles are listed under the VG section. Pagrashtak 18:56, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, I hit a snag nearly right off the bat, with Animal Crossing. When the Nintendo project was still a project, that article was (Start-Mid) for VG and (Start-High) for Nintendo. The High was enough to get it included under Nintendo's scope, but the Mid was not enough to get it included under the VG scope. So it's on the Nintendo list and not the VG list. Now that the Nintendo banner is no longer, I suppose SelectionBot would not select the article if it were ran today. I've been coordinating a workshop at Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Wikipedia 0.7 workshop to try to get a centralized effort to clean up VG 0.7 articles and get oldids selected, but I see now that there will be a few VG articles like Animal Crossing that are not included there, as I built that workshop off of the main VG listing. Pagrashtak 21:01, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, it sounds like the Nintendo articles will have to be considered independently for now. I don't think we want to deselect articles without good reason. Hopefully, more established task forces will be OK. Walkerma (talk) 03:48, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Holes in the net?

I've done a partial scan through selected articles by score as I suspect a lot of articles are getting through the net. After getting about 40% of the way through this huge list, I'm staggered by the number of sub-B-class articles on the list. User_talk:Philcha#v_0.7_hitlist lists those in the first 40% for which I think I alone have sufficient prior knowledge to knock out adequate content for a B-class article, so I'd only have to look up a few refs and then dash off a lead - and I assume some are virtually B-class, but have just not been reviewed, or have good main content but inadequate leads.

I expect that WP collectively can do a lot better than I can alone - but a process is needed to mobilise all that collective brainpower. I suggest something like:

• Pick a target level - I've assumed B-class, as I suspect there will be a shortage of reviwers for a while and therefore A-class or GA is unrealistic; you may know better.
• Send to each Wikiproject a hit-list of articles to be improved. The message should comment that it may be appropriate to merge some and / or turn some into disambiguation or portal pages. One pattern I've noticed in my incomplete scan is that: articles about disciplines (e.g. Paleontology, which I'm working on) get poor treatment, presumably because of the breadth of knowledge required; articles on "basic" topics get poor treatment (e.g. Vertebrate), because it's hard to find peer-reviewed articles about them and one needs to use as refs textbooks which are not avaiable online and therefore cost $, and possibly out of sheer intellectual snobbery.
• Make a list of high-score but low-grade articles without categories and assign categories.
• Where an article's Talk page does not specify a Wikiproject, send to all Wikiprojects whose names contain any of the categories under which "hitlist" articles are listed.
• As a last resort, create a category of high-score but low-grade articles and send all WP editors a message linking to this list and asking for help. -- Philcha (talk) 20:03, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

. -- Philcha (talk) 20:03, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. We're having a (fairly informal) IRC meeting on #wikipedia-1.0 tomorrow (Monday) at 2000h UTC, I'll raise the idea then, and of course you're welcome to join us. From the feedback I've seen some projects are already doing this, they've suddenly noticed that their top-importance articles are Start-Class! You're definitely right about the broader topics - I remember trying to bring Humanities up to scratch for V0.5, it was only a little more than a stub + a list in 2005. Much easier to write about the Battle of X or something specific. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 20:10, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Concerned about Start articles

I'm a little concerned about the number of Start articles in the selection. For example, about 1/3 of the Mathematics WikiProject articles are Start class and, ummm, I don't think they show off the quality of that WikiProject very well. I'm struggling to bring the conic sections up to snuff, beginning with hyperbola, but there are many, many articles that won't get improved. Some articles are rated Start out of modesty, but relatively few it seems. Do we really want to include Start articles in something that will be assessed?

Also, I happened to notice many articles rated as Top importance that seem implausibly so, being found in no other encyclopedia and having extremely low hitcounts (less than 1500). I like the articles involved, so I'm not naming names, but it does seem as though personal preferences may influence some Importance ratings. Any suggestions for cross-checking the Top (and maybe High) importance rankings? Willow (talk) 19:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I share Willow's concern about Start-class articles - tho I'm no mathematician, paleontology's my main activity. It's probably too late now, but for next time round I suggest making a preliminary selection 6 months in advance then periodically reminding Wikiprojects of selected articles that remain at below the target level (B-class ?). It may take some pushing, as the Top- / High-importance Start-class articles that I'm picking up (in paleo and related areas) are the wide-scope ones in which one needs to summarise a ton of content and therefore to have a ton of refs (not all used) in one's toolbox - e.g. Arthropod, which I've tried to improve and now needs review.

I haven't seen so many questionable "Top"- / "High"-importance articles as Willow seems to have, but I expect the Editorial Team has the tools to do the automatable quantified part of a check (mainly hit counts). After that it's down to editors who know their subjects, as they may have good reasons for rating less popular articles as "Top"- / "High"-importance, e.g. if they are essential to proper understanding of other, more popular articles. That suggests the automate process should have a whitelist facility, so that it does not repeatedly question an importance rating if it has been justified once. -- Philcha (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I share the concern, too. I don't have experience with a lot of wikiprojects, but in Oregon I believe we have a policy that any assessment above Start should be made by someone who is not a primary contributor. I think we're pretty diligent about watching for things like that, and self-regulating. If this is more broadly true, it would mean that anything above Start is likely to have been assessed by a second party, which is a good thing.

I'm way behind on where this project is -- but is it really too late to post some reminders to WikiProjects, and requests that they bring some articles up to C class or better by a certain deadline? Even if there is no "stick" to go along with this request, I suspect the more active projects would make an effort to pitch in. In Oregon, we've already had one Collaboration of the Week based on a Version 1.0 request. -Pete (talk) 21:50, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Need help to figure out something

Recently, I found that {{Environment}}'s unassessed articles fall into Category:Unassessed Environment articles recently, but it is supposed to go under Category:Unassessed-Class Environment articles. Does anyone know what caused the change? OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 12:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

That's due to {{WPBannerMeta/qualityscale}}, part of {{WPBannerMeta}}. I'm not comfortable editing it since a lot of projects utilise it. I'll leave a message for HappyMelon, they seem to maintain it. Hiding T 13:06, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

As Hiding says, the WPBannerMeta template sorts all unassessed articles into some Category:Unassessed PROJECT articles. Is there some pressing and vital reason why this recategorisation is undesirable? Happy‑melon 09:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Cause in Category:Environment articles by quality, you can see that the formatting is all "XYZ-class Environment articles", not "XYZ Environment articles". And if you go to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Environment articles by quality statistics and click on "Unassessed", it will bring you to the category with the word "class" in it. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 12:29, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

WP:CRIC statistics

Hello. Could someone please amend Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Cricket articles by quality statistics to include C-class statistics. WP:CRIC has recently introduced the rating and a few articles have already been awarded a C. Thanks. BlackJack | ^{talk page} 14:57, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

IRC on Version 0.7?

I'd like us to hold another IRC discussion to figure out how things are progressing, and what still needs to be done. I've also been in contact with the Foundation and with our collaborators in France, so we can discuss that too. Would Monday October 13, at 2000h UTC be OK for people? That's 4pm Eastern Daylight Time in the US. Please let us know below if you can (or can't but would like to) come. Walkerma (talk) 15:03, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, something has come up for me - I think I'd like to propose a meeting 24 hours later - 2000h on Tuesday. Would that work? Walkerma (talk) 21:32, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

• OK for meKelson (talk) 16:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Works for me. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 17:25, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Oops. I usually work from home, but the secretary is out, and I'm going to be tied up in the office today. I don't have much to report except what you can see at WT:1C: no volunteers so far except me, and I'm keeping up with all the non-fiction articles that have been submitted for copyediting. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 15:33, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Channel

#wikipedia-1.0

Time

2000h UTC (4pm US EDT)

Proposed timeline for Version 0.7

• 20 October : deadline for version id
• 30 October : deadline for every content modification (author list, summary, non-free image deletion, stub template deletion, etc)
• 10 November : deadline for the Zeno dump and alpha of kiwix 0.7
• 15 November : beta of kiwix 0.7
• 20 November : final-release

Agenda

• How will we merge the manual list with the main bot list and the addendum? How will we remove articles in cases where WikiProjects have requested this?
• Copyediting initiative
• VersionID selection
• Index pages
• Image files
• Publication & distribution, WMF involvement
• Any other business

Please join us! Walkerma (talk) 19:21, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I wasn't able to make it. Can someone update me on what copyediting is needed, other than what's submitted at WT:1C? I see "WMF involvement" above; do they have concerns I need to be paying attention to? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:43, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll send you a log via email. The copyediting part was mainly supposed to be an update from you, and I reported what you'd told me. Other than several, "Yes, that's an important initiative" we didn't have anything to add. Walkerma (talk) 17:19, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Deleted articles still in assessment log/lists of articles as redlinks

In the bot-generated list of articles for WP:WINE there are two redlinks, i.e., articles that are still in there (and presumably counts towards the sums in the assessment matrix) despite having been deleted several bot runs ago. They are Crahasani-Vin (winery) (in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Wine articles by quality/4) and Rocanales (in the page Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Wine articles by quality/5). 2 redlinks out of 2,000+ articles is not that high a failure rate, but it still looks strange to me. Is this a bug or has something been done wrong when these two articles were erased? Tomas e (talk) 20:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It's because the main article was deleted, but the talk page was not, for some reason. If the article deserves to be deleted, the talk page should be, too - after copying any important discussion. Walkerma (talk) 21:18, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Or if it's an Archive page, in which case you just remove the offending banners. Redirects will also show up in the lists, and I use AWB to find them and fix 'em semi-manually (see User:Nifboy/AWB). Nifboy (talk) 18:12, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Version 0.7 selection schedule

I'm not sure where to ask questions about the Version 0.7 release, but hope here is okay. I'm tidying up and making improvements to articles selected for Version 0.7. I would like to know when a bot will come by and select specific versions (permanent link?) of articles, so I can aim to have articles in best shape possible when that happens. --Aude (talk) 16:17, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I missed your response at the time. In the posting on WikiProject pages we set October 20th as a target date, so theoretically we've passed that deadline. The main list has already been compiled. However, we will need to make some changes in the next few days, so if you have some specific versionIDs to give us, perhaps you could post them on my talk page? Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 15:06, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I have done cleanup and improvements to most of the articles picked that fall within project scope. (see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_September_11,_2001#Selected_articles) Thus, we are okay with having the bot come by at some point and select versionIDs (as long as it doesn't pick vandalized versions of the pages). Though, it would help to know when the bot will select the versionIDs, so any further improvements can be done before then. --Aude (talk) 18:03, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

WP:CRIC statistics (again)

Hello. Could you please make a further amendment to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Cricket articles by quality statistics to include items in Category:Bottom-importance cricket articles. These need to be displayed in an additional importance column between "low" and "none". Thanks again. BlackJack | ^{talk page} 14:57, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure that the bot supports bottom category. Ruslik (talk) 11:07, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. Not a problem. BlackJack | ^{talk page} 13:17, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Chicago and Illinois quality stats not running again.

The WP:CHICAGO and WP:Illinois quality stats bot is not running again.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 06:34, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

If the bot has not run for a long time, you can update statistics manually with this form. Ruslik (talk) 14:08, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Due to the size of the project, I have had problems running the statisitics myself.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:30, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Strangely, the bot refuses to update WP:Illinois statistics. However it updated Wikipedia:WikiProject_Space statistics at my request. Ruslik (talk) 12:33, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

So Illinois can not get a stats update? How often is Chicago scheduled to update?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 16:52, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

It has been 9 days since Illinois last ran and 8 since Chicago last ran.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 04:00, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Yes, the bot seems to be running, but only quite slowly. Looking at the logs of a few random projects, it seems to be taking weeks rather than days between cycles. There seem to have been a lot done around November 14, but many have not been done since. I know that CBM has been pretty busy, but I'll see if he can figure it out. Walkerma (talk) 12:28, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Flagged revisions

There was a proposal last month to enable the Flagged Revisions scheme for FAs, and it looks like it may go forward. Note that the flagged revisions extension would be very useful for this group when preparing offline releases - as we prepare version 0.7, we have often had to "guess" what is the best article version, rather than using a scheme like this which would (hopefully!) give us better results. Whatever your views, please comment at Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions#Take_the_bull_by_the_horns. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 09:51, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

WP Palestine Assessment box update

The Assessment box of WikiProject Palestine has not been updated since October 26. Could someone please update it. It used to be updated regularly. Here is the link, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Palestine-related articles by quality statistics. --Al Ameer son (talk) 04:43, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Done. Note:You can run the bot yourself on any WP.Pyrotec (talk) 17:53, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

List/Topic class expansion

Since there are featured list and featured topics, wouldn't it make sense to give them A/G/B/C/Start/Stub ratings as well?

New classes would be AL, GL, BL, CL, StartL, StubL, AT, GT, BT, CT, StartT, StubT, or something similar. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:07, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Revision to WP:LEAD

Looking for feedback here before I go back to WT:LEAD. I'd like to delete this sentence from WP:LEAD: "For the planned Wikipedia 1.0 ... one recommendation is that the articles consist of just the lead section of the web version." A lead section isn't just a summary, it's a thesis statement, full of vague statements whose details are filled in by the article, and falsifiable statements that are proved (or not!) in the article. Take away the rest of the article, and, in general, what you've got left are a bunch of sentences of the kind that policy and guidelines warn us not to make ... vague and unsubstantiated.

I understand that we might reach a decision that there's not enough room on the DVD for, say, 30000 articles from one wikiproject, but there's room for the leads. One way to tackle this would be to combine the desired lead sections from multiple pages into a summary article and then review the summary article. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

What we envision is a collection of short, snappy summaries. I would say it's more of a suggestion than a recommendation, though. "Who is Cheryl Cole?" OK, she was the singer with Girls Aloud, now a TV personality. "What is is MCPBA used for?" OK, it's used as a reagent for oxidation in organic chemistry. "Where in England is a village called Thropton?" etc. That is what many people use WP for, and we could probably fit half a million such ledes onto one DVD (I'm guessing). The fact that there are little or few citations doesn't matter - if someone disagrees with the offline lede-article, they can always go to the online version for more information. Remember that most dictionaries don't cite sources, and the entire contents of most print encyclopaediae would be likewise fail our rules on reliable sources; but the difference is that our readers can see the sources online. BTW, ledes are already being used occasionally for this purpose - for an example, go to this site and type in "toluene". This type of use (I don't think that site is unique) might help people see the value of ledes. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 22:34, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

WP:LEAD applies in some vague sense to all WP articles since it's a guideline, and it applies in a very real sense to GAs (it's in WP:GA?). Your points are good, but they apply only to those articles whose severed heads might wind up on a DVD. If we want to do this, let's have a discussion about which first sentences, and which lead sections, might be suitable for a DVD, and then tag them on the talk pages and warn the relevant wikiprojects to be careful with those leads. I don't think it's a good idea to have a guideline that says that any article's lead section might get separated from its body, the implication being that the lead should be written accordingly, because that might apply to few, or to no, articles. I still kind of like my idea that if these snappy sentences are considered good material for the DVD, then there's no reason we can't stuff 10 or 20 of them into one article (perhaps via transclusion) and review the article using the usual review processes. Perhaps I'm just trying to avoid work; I'd rather these decisions be made by the usual editors in the usual way all year long, rather than by (shudder) me in some last-minute re-jiggering to fit things on a DVD. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany

Hi, I am not sure if this article eligible for release version. The article is probably not must-have for a print encyclopedia, but it is informative and well-researched article. Otolemur crassicaudatus (talk) 21:55, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

This would be a great choice for a more specialised release, but probably not right for a small, general selection. Walkerma (talk) 03:54, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Purpose of 1.0

Hello, I had a basic question. What is the purpose of this project? Is it for-profit? or is to distribute the encyclopedia to people who don't have the internet? I read Jimmy Wales initial on the project page about it being an alternative to Britainica.

regards --DFS454 (talk) 13:42, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Many of the answers can be found on the FAQ page. The central goal is not making money, though we may collaborate with for-profit publishers. The main goals are to distribute free knowledge to those who aren't on the internet, and to provide vandalism-free versions (if possible) of articles for educational use. The upcoming release (0.7) will be published on DVD by a small for-profit publisher, but everything is open (the software is open source etc), and (as I understand it) the complete package will also be available for free download & distribution. Walkerma (talk) 03:48, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Timescale for WP 1.0

What's the timescale, especially by when should articles be brought up to the required standard? --Philcha (talk) 14:53, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

I supplied the final list of articles to the programmers more than a week ago, and the bots/scripts have presumably been working since then, so some versions may already have been selected. But if you have a specific version of a specific article you want to select, let me know on my talk page - we can still take that. Walkerma (talk) 03:50, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

GA-Class again

The GA-Class issue continues to cause problems and I wonder if it might benefit from another discussion. The problem, in a nutshell, is that editors routinely equate GA-Class with good article status, when this is:

1. false, since A-Class articles can also be good articles;
2. a confusion of WikiProject assessments (which vary from project to project) with the good article process (community-wide review of an article against the good article criteria).

The problems include the following:

• What to do with WikiProject assessments when a good article is delisted?
• Inappropriate pressure on good article reviewers and other editors to add WikiProject guidelines to the good article criteria when considering the good article status of an article.

The latter issue has been heightened by the new C-Class, because of the argument: "This article is only C-Class so it can't be a good article". Well, no, if it meets the good article criteria, it can be.

In previous discussions I have advocated getting rid of the confusing "GA-Class" idea, and I still think this would be preferable. However, an alternative has occurred to me: give a simple definition of GA-Class and promote it across the encyclopedia. The definition I would propose is:

• An article is GA-Class, for a given WikiProject, if the WikiProject assessment would rate it as B-Class, but it is also a good article.

This would solve the above problems. When listing good articles, reviewers would change B to GA, but not touch (e.g.) A-Class or C-Class. When delisting good articles, reviewers would change GA to B, but not touch (e.g.) A-Class or C-Class. Reviewers would thus be freed to concentrate on the good article criteria, since not only A-Class, but also (e.g.) C-Class articles can be good articles without being GA-Class. Geometry guy 20:59, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

If I understand right, you're saying that you would still prefer to get rid of "GA-class". "GA-class" seems likely to produce confusion to me, too. If for some reason we can't axe it, I support your alternative. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:17, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

I am really confused by the points being made here. Do you have any examples of C-class articles that have achieved good article status? It sounds very odd that we can have good articles below GA-class level. Road Wizard (talk) 21:32, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

It is really confusing, and there aren't examples of C-Class articles which have achieved good article status simply because this confusion eliminates them by making them GA-Class. An ongoing example of this confusion is Huletts Landing, New York.

The good article criteria focus primarily on issues that can be identified by a general reviewer, whereas WikiProjects have specific content guidelines. Chalk and cheese. Geometry guy 23:17, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

I really don't see a problem with that Huletts Landing, New York article you mentioned. It is a good article and has been set at GA-class status. Are you trying to suggest that it shouldn't be GA-class?

I am sorry if I am sounding like an idiot, but the point you are trying to make escapes me. As far as I am aware an article that gains good article status is promoted to GA-class (if not already at A-class). If an article loses good article status it drops to something below GA-class.

Are there any projects you can name that are operating in a different way? I had thought that individual projects used the same quality criteria as set by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, so inconsistencies are a little surprising to me. Road Wizard (talk) 23:49, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

No, I'm not: see WP:Good article reassessment/Huletts Landing, New York/1. All projects have their own criteria, so different ratings are inevitable: see e.g., this example. Check the next diff too: someone has imposed their viewpoint across 8 WikiProjects! "Drops to something below GA status". Well, no, not if it is A-Class. And if it isn't, to what does it drop? Geometry guy 00:11, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

As I understand it, an A-class article is judged to be just short of Featured status but has not needed to go through a formal review stage (though some A-class articles have done). If an article is nominated for GA but fails, then there is a strong implication that it is extremely well short of Featured status and that the A-class rating is now no longer applicable. A reassessment of the article against the V1.0 quality criteria would then be appropriate, which would decide the new class. If projects or editors have conflicting views of whether the article should retain A-class despite the failed GA then that is a matter to resolve between themselves. It is only GA, FA and FL ratings that need a wider involvement from the community.

The discussion you linked to does not appear to mention conflicting WikiProject assessments. There is a debate about whether the good article criteria are actually complied with (referring to criteria #3) and a reference to a guideline on city articles (which the majority of editors in the discussion pointed out was not applicable to a hamlet). Road Wizard (talk) 00:48, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Oppose. This proposal will only create more confusion, not less. Many reviewers will continue to assume that GA-class means just Good Article despite all warning and instructions. If they find a good article that is rated as C-class they will simply change the class parameter to GA-class. There is another problem—accountability. If a reviewer changes C to GA, it will not be immediately clear why it happened. In other words the reviewer rated an article as B-class and then actually assigned GA-class per your proposal, or the reviewer was just unaware that C-class should not be simply changed to GA ? As a result it will be impossible to check the accuracy of GA-class rating. I also want to say that I do not actually know any example, where an article simultaneously satisfied WP:GACR and failed WP:BCLASS.

Of course, there exists sort of a perennial proposal to completely divorce projects ratings from Wikipedia wide ones. If you make such a proposal I will be more supportive. Ruslik (talk) 16:36, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm taking from this that all 4 of us think that if people only used the letters "GA" to refer to articles that have passed GAN, it would be less confusing for everyone, and we think that the A, B and C ratings will probably be sufficient for the review processes of wikiprojects. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:56, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

If you are asking "should GA-class be used solely for articles that have achieved good article status?" Then my answer is yes. I would be surprised if GA is given to articles that haven't passed through the good article nomination process.

If your question is "should we remove GA and rely solely on A, B and C?" Then my answer would be no. A lot of WikiProjects that I have seen aim to get as many GA and FA articles as they can. I have not seen many that have a specific motivation to achieve A-class or B-class except as a step to either FA or GA. Removing GA from the assessment scale could significantly reduce the motivation of WikiProjects to chase the higher ratings.

If you could come up with a method that incorporated GA into the scale in an alternative manner then I would be willing to compromise. For example, an assessment scale that included the steps: Stub, Start, C, B, B-GA, A, A-GA, FA (The B-GA step would be identical to the B except that the article also has good article status). Road Wizard (talk) 17:35, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I actually think it would be a good idea to have two class parameters. The first 'class' will assume 'stub', 'start', 'C', 'B' and 'A' (and also 'List' etc). The second 'wikiclass' will assume FA,FL,GA or NA. Ruslik (talk) 17:51, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

The question on this issue that I've never had satisfactorilly answered is: why aren't A-Class articles at least GA-Class standard. Currently we have a hierarchical scale where A-Class is above GA-Class; there is an implicit assumption there that an article rated as "A-Class" must be better than "GA-Class". That means it should easily meet the GA standards. Where is the logical flaw there? I would like to challenge anyone (cookies will be available!) to show me either an article properly rated A-Class that does not meet the GA-Class criteria, or an article that meets the GA-Class criteria but not the B-Class criteria (the situation postulated above, which I am entirely unconvinced can actaully occur). We have four classes, FA, A, GA and B, which have objective inclusion criteria. Those four sets of criteria have been written to be hierarchical, such that the scale is entirely linear. The confusion stems from the varying methods by which articles are judged against those criteria, and the differing lengths of time that it takes to complete each assessment. Every article is at any one moment in a distinct position on the scale, whether or not the assessments reflect that position accurately (this is a problem not confined to GA/A, but to all articles needing reassessment). It just so happens that it tends to take a lot longer for an article to 'graduate' through the B/GA boundary, such that it often (since it continues to improve in real time) reaches A-Class or even FA-Class before it nominally attains GA. Most of this confusion stems from not separating the 'real' status of an article (which is an absolute and (now) objective position on a strictly linear scale) from its 'nominal' status (how it is reflected in banner assessments and reviews). The 'nominal' view will inevitably lag behind the former, and thanks to the variety we have in the assessment methods for 'nominal' ratings, some lag further behind than others. But I am unconvinced that the solution involves anything more than finding ways to speed up and facilitate GA-Class regognition to the point where it doesn't get entirely ommitted. All FA and A-Class articles are GA quality, it's just that often editors don't bother to go through the rigmarole of obtaining a GA review pass before pressing on. Just because the article doesn't have that nominal rating doesn't mean that it's magically able to be of a professional standard without being well written. Happy‑melon 18:04, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

The logical flaw is in the assumption that there is a single scale. It is a chimera. Different WikiProjects do different things, have different ratings, and interact with the community in different ways. I agree with Ruslik that it would be more logical to have two class parameters, one for WikiProject assessments, another for FA, FL, GA or NA. However, the latter parameter is already largely covered by {{ArticleHistory}}. There is no 'real' assessment, as different WikiProjects have different priorities and different criteria. Centralizing WikiProject ratings defeats their purpose, which is to allow WikiProjects to track progress.

The good article process likewise has its own criteria. There are plenty of articles which WikiProjects would rate as A-Class which do not meet the criteria, and, apparently, some articles which WikiProjects would rate as C-Class which do. This push and pull cannot go on.

There are two solutions: decoupling GA from the WikiProject scales entirely, or defining GA-Class in such a way that it does not hinder the good article process. I would support either solution. I prefer the first, in agreement with Ruslik and Dank. However Happy-melon's response demonstrates the kind of resistance the first option faces. I understand Ruslik's concerns about the second option. However, if GA-Class is clearly tied to a particular WikiProject rating, then reviewers can be instructed on what it means. Sure they will make mistakes, but at present they have absolutely no idea, because the situation is a logical mess. Geometry guy 21:39, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Your argument makes sense, but is based on axioms that I simply don't agree are valid. I have yet to see any evidence that any articles genuinely lie on a 'fold' of the linear scale, meeting a 'higher' set of criteria without meeting 'lower' ones. Some examples would be invaluable as currently I consider this proposal a 'solution' to a problem which does not in fact appear to exist. I don't accept your argument about there being no "real" assessment; as the whole point of the 1.0 scale is to create an objective quality rating outside the priorities of individual wikiprojects, which can be quite literally used to compare chalk and cheese on wikipedia-wide releases. The rating which fits least easily into that philosophy is in fact A-Class, not GA. The relationship between WP1.0 and the other WikiProjects is at best symbiotic: the reason we use a unified scale with such (in places) ridiculously vague criteria is because it has to apply wiki-wide. I am aware of no corners of that territory where the scale 'folds' and articles genuinely meet one set of criteria but not others. If an article is rated A-Class by one project but C-Class by another, I am yet to be convinced that the situation is any more complicated than the latter project needing to be updated. Examples, please? Happy‑melon 22:06, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

No. Wikipedia 1.0 is a WikiProject too, and has its own priorities and hence its own scale. The Wikipedia 1.0 ratings are the ones which are used to provide release versions. Surely they are influenced by other WikiProjects, but to suggest that they dictate to other WikiProjects that "you got it wrong" is completely contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia. Imposing WP1.0 ratings on other WikiProjects is as absurd as the Chemistry WikiProject imposing its view on the Biology WikiProject. I have already given the example of John von Neumann many times including above. Please read as well as write. Geometry guy 22:28, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any problem with the John von Neumann article. An editor has reassessed the article against the V1.0 criteria and updated the banners accordingly. Have any of the WikiProjects concerned complained to the editor about the decision to reassess the article? I can't see anything on the editor's talk page about it. Nor have any of the involved WikiProjects attempted to restore any of the ratings in the 3 months since the revision.

Also, of the 9 WikiProject banners listed, 8 appear to be using the standard V1.0 criteria with the Maths Project using a slightly modified criteria that includes a B+ rating. As such the editor was perfectly entitled to provide an updated rating for each of the 8 projects (while choosing to leave the Maths rating alone).

You appear to be operating under a misconception that the V1.0 project is a dictator. All the projects involved in the 1.0 assessment have signed up to the 1.0 criteria, it was not forced upon them. Can you please provide some form of evidence of your dictatorial claim? Road Wizard (talk) 22:47, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Quite. The 1.0 project is not some autocratic leader that goes round patrolling talk pages and snapping at inconsistencies. Like all WikiProjects, it is an ephemeral creature that barely exists in physical form: all wikiprojects are essentially collections of otherwise diverse articles and editors that happen to share a common interest. To an 'outsider' most WikiProjects barely appear to affect an article at all; it is only when you approach the mainspace from 'underneath' that you realise how vital these ghostly organisations really are. The 1.0 project is merely the most ephemeral of them all: its scope is every single article in the mainspace, and as a result the people who organise its architecture have no time whatsoever to "dictate to other WikiProjects that [they] got it wrong". Fortunately, the 1.0 project can also call upon the entire body of wikipedia editors who share a common interest in improving all wikipedia articles, it is this fusion that brings some cohesion to the project as a whole. It's not a question of saying "you got it wrong", rather it's "you're out of date". Of course the assessment is out of date, that's pretty much the definition of working in an environment like this. Some areas are more out of date than others; again, this is an inevitable consequence of subdividing the impossible task of managing assessments on 2,500,000 articles. Those projects that have signed up to use the 1.0 assessment scheme have decided that a symbiotic relationship with 1.0 benefits them; that they obtain more value from being able to use the scale to guide their own activities, than the effort they must expend to update it so it can guide 1.0's. No one is "dictating" anything to anyone; instead we have collaboration, the epitome of the spirit of wikipedia.

I must agree with the von Neuman article: I can see that it clearly meets the B-Class criteria, I can't see that it has been judged to not meet the GA-Class criteria. None of the projects on the page have passed it in an A-Class review (it was unilaterally rated A-Class in 2006 without any formalities), so it is correct that its 'nominal' status not be A-Class. Its 'real' status is, IMO on a quick read, somewhere between GA and A, but it is simply an example of an article where the 'real' and 'nominal' ratings have drifted more than is strictly healthy. How exactly do you believe that this article 'folds' the assessment scale? Happy‑melon 23:24, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow, you guys know how to ramble. So, if there is a unified scale, why does each WikiProject template have a separate class parameter? Geometry guy 23:40, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Damn good question! Happy‑melon 23:50, 16 November 2008 (UTC) Was that concise enough for you? :D

It is often difficult trying to find a balance between giving a complete answer for the sake of clarity and providing too much information. In a text-based discussion where misunderstandings are common I will often err in giving too much information than too little. ^_~

The reason for the separate fields is primarily due to coding issues. If someone could design a template that can share a single quality assessment between the different 1.0 compliant project banners on a page then it would be something worth considering. Road Wizard (talk) 23:55, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I do not think it is a big problem. You can have one unified template with projectN= parameters, which will display different banners for wikiprojects, but will use a single class parameter. The separate class parameters were introduced only to allow different projects to rate articles differently. Ruslik (talk) 04:59, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Huh? I'm afraid I don't follow. Are you talking about something like {{WPBS}} with |class=Cheesecake as a global parameter? Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 05:07, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

I mean that the project name can be specified like projectN=PROJECT NAME (N=1,2,...). Ruslik (talk) 09:05, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Rock on Category:Cheesecake-Class articles!!! :D Happy‑melon 14:30, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Section break

(←) Whoa! I'm shocked by the answers I'm getting from H-M and R-W. Do you want to centralize the WikiProject assessments or something? And force WikiProjects to agree with each other on what is the class of every article they share? What if there is a dispute? Geometry guy 20:43, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Do I want to centralise 1.0 assessments? Not particularly; there are plenty of things that are more badly broken to devote attention to. Would it be ultimately sensible to do so? Probably yes. It's a question of perspective: I suspect that you're most used to seeing the assessment scheme from the 'bottom up', seeing collections of articles within the scope of project X, where project X spends a great deal of time and effort ensuring that those articles are assessed accurately. But where do those assessments come from? An "accurate" assessment is one that agrees with the accepted criteria, and what are those criteria? They're WP:1.0/A, and more specifically WP:B?, WP:GA?, WP:A?, WP:FA?, respectively. Apart from a tiny handful of WikiProjects (I can quite literally think of WPMaths and WPMilhist and no others), every project that uses any assessment scheme at all uses the 1.0 assessment scale. Which means that yes, in principle, they should agree, and the only way there can be a genuine discrepancy is if someone is mistaken. From 'above', the 1.0 assessment scheme looks more like a unified whole, where the goal is to accurately assess all articles through the convenient middlemen of the 1,800 WikiProjects that have signed up to the program. Different topics are handled by different wikiprojects, some areas are covered more thoroughly and efficiently than others, but at the end of the day the result is one unified assessment scheme that covers 1,500,000 articles. Why should there be discrepancy? There shouldn't be any need to "force" WikiProjects to do anything (and can we please move away from the image of WP1.0 "forcing" this and "dictating" that? Because that is simply wrong and not what anyone is trying to say), there never has been and there never will. Most individual editors who conduct 1.0 assessments seem to understand instinctively that the assessment scheme is one program broken up into thousands of chunks, which tend to overlap somewhat, that's why in the vast majority of cases, all the banners on a talk page read the same thing. A-Class has always been an exception in this respect, which solidifies its "odball" status in my mind. But any one article has exactly one 'real' position on any one assessment scale, and any discrepancy between that 'real' status and the 'nominal' status it is given in the 1, 2, 15 WikiProject banners on its talk page is purely a result of lag. Between two separate assesment scales, yes, it is perfectly possible for ratings to vary: articles can quite legitimately be C-Class on the 1.0 assessment scale but Start-Class on the Milhist scale. But when all bar two of the WikiProjects doing assessments are singing from the same song sheet, there is no situation where they should be at odds. WikiProjects don't do assessments; editors do. And when those editors have to update ten class assessments instead of one to bring the 'nominal' rating of a page in line with its real rating, yes, there is inefficiency there, and in due course we should be working to correct that. Happy‑melon 21:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

This reminds me of University life, in which the center is completely out-of-touch with what the front line does. WikiProjects use WikiProject assessments to track the progress of articles. They do not do it to build WP1.0 and they do not do it to classify articles for readers. They haven't signed up to anything: they are simply using the scheme because it fits their needs.

How can a WikiProject track progress if it does not have control over its own project assessments? You think it is right that the WikiProject assessments at Talk:John von Neumann were unilaterally changed to B. You metaphorically stroke your beard and say "it lies somewhere between GA and A", but there is a "drift" between "nominal" and "real". According to whom? Whose interpretation of the assessment is right?

Let's take broadness. Does an article cover the major points? What are the major points? It depends whom you ask. The WikiProjects may be singing from broadly the same song sheet, but they sing in many different keys. Geometry guy 22:49, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Just to point out that I have had little involvement in the central WP1.0 beyond this discussion. In effect I am on the front line.

The project I am most heavily involved in currently has 830 articles unassessed and most of the remaining 555 articles haven't been reassessed in months. If a member of another WikiProject comes along and assesses the article against the standard criteria and updates their project banner, I would be more than happy for them to update my project banner too. Having an updated assessment is very beneficial for me and other project members as we can see where best to focus our resources or where to learn lessons about what makes a high quality article in a particular field. There are far too many assessments to be made for a single editor, so collaborative assessment is always welcome. (On a side issue, can you please point out any comments from editors that have complained about the reassessment of the John von Neumann article? I asked before, but I haven't seen a response.)

From the way you are phrasing yourself I suspect that you are thinking too much in terms of the formal GA, FL and FA assessments where consensus is needed to promote or demote an article. Please take a step back from that and try to consider the rest of the assessment scale in a different light.

For the other assessment ratings there is no formal method of promoting or demoting. It is solely a judgement made by individual editors (or a small group of editors) against the criteria. Of course there will be disagreements about the rating, but these can be worked out on an individual basis. The informal assessments are not an end in and of themselves. I have not seen an editor yet who aims to get a B-class article or an A-class article and stop there; what they aim for is to improve the article to a standard where they can get formal acknowledgement of GA or FA status. The input of another editor into the assessment is an asset rather than a detriment. If an editor comes along to an A-class article and says "This should be B-class because of the shortage of in-line citations", do you think it would succeed at an FA assessment? I doubt it. The reassessment is an opportunity for editors to measure how far they are away from formal recognition of FA and GA and even a temporary demotion on the informal scale is in reality a step closer to achieving that formal recognition.

It would be great if we could have a formal review stage at every jump between Start-class > C-class, C-class > B-class, B-class > A-class, but given the routine backlog in the formal assessment processes, do you think adding another million or two articles into the formal system would improve things? The informal assessment serves the purpose of directing improvement towards formal assessment without consuming an inordinate amount of human resources.

I am sorry if you consider this a "ramble" too, but I think it is important to clarify these things. Road Wizard (talk) 23:29, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

I am strongly in favor of informal assessment. I would guess that I have assessed about 2000 articles for the mathematics project, so your impression is certainly way off the mark.

We need to monitor, encourage and track progress. Ultimately editors are individuals and not WikiProjects, so anyone can update any banner. But the banners must remain distinct, and their class parameters distinct, so that each WikiProject can use them to best effect. "This [A-Class article] should be B-Class because of the shortage of in-line citations" would not be welcome commentary at WT:WPM; each WikiProject is different.

Your comments further reinforce my view that WikiProject assessments and community-wide assessments have a fundamentally different nature. Geometry guy 00:15, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Why? If the editor comes along and says "This article has five key things wrong with it that prevent it from reaching FA status", is there any difference between a Maths article and a Politics article? If you nominated the article for Featured status would the review treat the article any different by saying "well, there are five things wrong with it as compared to the FA criteria, but we will let it pass because it happens to be about Maths"?

However, as acknowledged earlier in the discussion the Maths project has a slightly different set of criteria to that used by most other WikiProjects. If you have a problem with someone else updating the ratings on your banner then a brief comment on the user's talk page will put them right. If your project is an exception to the rule that most projects appreciate a collaborative assessment then I don't see why "the rule" needs to change to make the vast majority of projects into the exception instead.

For a third time I ask if you have any evidence that someone has complained about the reassessment of the John von Neumann article. Is there any evidence at all that this is a mass problem that needs an arbitrary ruling from on high? From your earlier insinuation that WP1.0 is acting like a dictator this would be an interesting turn for you to ask for all other WikiProjects to stop sharing assessments because the minority of WikiProjects don't like it. Road Wizard (talk) 01:04, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

And for the third time you have made your point at great length, but approach the issue from the wrong perspective. There does not need to be a "ruling from on high", because it has always been the case that WikiProject assessments are independent. Sure, they are collaborative, but read what Ruslik says: "The separate class parameters were introduced... to allow different projects to rate articles differently." Which part of this statement do you not understand? Geometry guy 08:12, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I am sorry, but I cannot agree that my view is "wrong". I have said repeatedly that disagreements of assessment can be resolved on an individual basis and that if the Maths project does not like another editor reassessing their articles then they are free to discuss this with the editor concerned. What is it that you are trying to change here? Road Wizard (talk) 09:08, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I think you do the WikiProjects a great disservice by labelling them as using the 1.0 scheme for purely selfish ends. Like everything else on-wiki, it is a collaborative effort which works because the various disparate groups work in harmony together, thereby achieving far more than they could manage alone. WikiProjects do indeed sign up to the 1.0 scheme because they stand to receive the tangible benefit of being able to track the progress of their articles, but to say that any benefits acrued to WP1.0 are entirely accidental is not accurate.

I think you're simply missing the fundamental point of a wiki-wide scale: progress is progress! How can WikiProject X track progress? In the same way, and using the same criteria, that WikiProject Y does it. It is ludicrous to think of WikiProjects "having control" over their assessments; projects do not own their banners and never will. As I've said before, a "WikiProject" is nothing more than the sum of its members plus the intangible additional 'X factor' they get from working together. WikiProjects don't make assessments, editors do. Whether they make those assessments 'on behalf of' WikiProject X, WikiProject X and WikiProject Y, or on behalf of WP1.0, is a meaningless semantic. "According to whom"? According to the editor who assesses the article, who participates in the GAC/FAC, who first tags the talk page. "Whose interpretation of the assessment is right"? Like everything else on wiki, the editors' interpretation is correct. In many cases, one particular WikiProject is more likely to contain editors with the knowledge to determine whether or not an article is, to use your example, covering the major points sufficiently. This is why it is entirely appropriate that criteria such as A-Class incorporate the opportunity for substantial WikiProject involvement. But the answer to the question "does the article cover the major points", the true answer, is independent of the person or group asking it. Of course some people are more likely than others to be able to answer that question correctly, but that's why we have discussion and consensus-based processes like FAC and ACR. The entire review process is nothing more or less than ten thousand editors running around trying to determine as accurately and yet as efficiently as possible how best to grade a body of two and a half million articles. The 1.0 scheme is nothing without those editors at the bottom and the architecture at the top; and that architecture is only there to facilitate the work of those at the bottom. Just because they're singing a ten-thousand part harmony doesn't mean they can't detect when someone or something is out of tune. Happy‑melon 00:01, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Your logic is based on the viewpoint that there is one scale and so there should be one class parameter. But to take your logic further, what about the "importance" parameter. Is there a "correct" value for that, or might it vary between WikiProjects? Geometry guy 00:19, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Unlike quality assessments there is no set criteria for "How important is this article to Wikipedia?" Instead the question used is "How important is this article to this particular subject area?" If you ask a project about WW1 whether an article is important, they may say "It is of top importance, this article is about a general who played a pivotal role in actions on the western front; out of X thousand articles within our scope this article is most important", but if you ask the Biography project about the same article they may say "No, it is not very important, the general played an important role in WW1, but beyond that sphere he had little influence in the rest of his life. Out of X hundred thousand articles within our scope this article is of Mid importance."

In theory you could create a standard importance scale based on the question "How important is this article to Wikipedia?" but I doubt that you would get a consensus on it any time soon. Whether there would be any benefit from a unified importance scale would also be debatable. Road Wizard (talk) 01:04, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Ditto "How broad is this article?", "How neutral is the article?", "How good is this article's prose?", "How high quality are this article's references?". That's why FAC is a debate to reach consensus over a yes/no question. Assigning a class is more than a yes/no question, and individual WikiProjects will and do apply the criteria differently. They always have. They always have been allowed to do so. If you believe that this is not the case, or wrong, and that WikiProjects should always come to the same conclusion about the class of every article, then it is up to you to supply the evidence, not me. Geometry guy 08:12, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

The importance scale is entirely different to the quality scale, and rightly so. In fact it provides further proof of the symbiotic nature of the 1.0 scheme. A wiki-wide "how important is this article to Wikipedia" scale would be most useful for WP1.0, but that's not what we've got. Why? Because that wouldn't provide tangible benefits to individual wikiprojects, which quite rightly want to obtain information on the relative importance of their articles only. If we adopted a wiki-wide importance scale, a large number of projects would find themselves with exclusively "low-importance" articles, which is utterly useless to them. So it is quite right that there are separate assessments of importance, as "importance" is a question not distinct from the person making the assessment, it's a subjective choice (although one supported by evidence). I'm not saying that all editors can magically agree on, again to use your example, how well written an article is. That's why it would be impossible to have a hundred-point scale instead of the 7-point scale we actually use. But if a sensible consensus of editors can't agree on which relatively wide box an article fits into, then there's a problem there, because the 1.0 scale is supposed to be objective. Although the process by which we reach a conclusion is varied, time-consuming and occasionally asinine, the end result is, in fact, a yes/no choice at each level. At every grade boundary we are trying to answer the question "does this article cross this line?". It can't be on both sides of the line; if it appears to be, it's because someone's seeing double. Happy‑melon 08:54, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

(e/c) They are not really comparable. Unlike the importance criteria there is a standard assessment scale for most WikiProjects (with a few exceptions like the Maths project as has been acknowledged repeatedly throughout this discussion).

Whoever said anything about WikiProjects having to "always come to the same conclusion"? At no point have I said that and I don't think anyone else in this discussion has either. What has been mentioned is that assessments will normally arrive at the same conclusion and that most WikiProjects are happy for other people outside of their projects to update their assessments. As you have said repeatedly, the Maths project would not appreciate someone taking a separate judgement of the article outside of the project and, as has been suggested repeatedly, you can point this out to any editors that attempt to alter a Maths assessment. There can't be that many editors who routinely assess Maths related articles so your requirements will become known to the relevant assessors very quickly. It strikes me as odd that the one example you have thrown into the discussion is one where the editor has deliberately chosen not to update the Maths banner and who has not received any complaints from any of the other projects. Who is the aggrieved party here? As far as I can see everyone is happy - the Maths assessment wasn't changed and none of the other projects have complained or made a reassessment in the last 3 months. Where is the problem?

Now, can you please clarify what you are wanting to achieve here? What are you trying to change? This discussion started out as an attempt to remove GA from the assessment scale, to which you received only marginal and conditional support. Do you want to take that any further now, or would you prefer to wait until a few months down the line when a new consensus may form in support of your idea?

The latter half of this discussion seems to centre around the principle of updating other WikiProjects' assessments and was fed to a large extent on your suggestion of a unified assessment (if you don't like an idea, it is sometimes best not to suggest it). Even if your idea of a unified assessment system is taken forward it will still need to pass through a consensus, so it is not likely to be introduced in the near future. However, it may be something to aspire to in the distant future. Road Wizard (talk) 09:08, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd be a little more conciliatory here: it's clear we have different perspectives on the nature of the 1.0 assesment scheme, an inevitable consequence of approaching it from different directions. I see the latter part of this discussion as an interesting academic exercise rather than a genuine motion for change. I think we all agree that, for whatever reason, consolidation of quality assessments is not going to happen in the immediate future. It's true, however, that the discussion has wandered far off topic, which was to consider GA-Class' position in the scale. Much of the discussion above is on the question of 'linearity': are there ever situations where the quality scale legitimately 'folds'? I don't think the answer to that question is yes; I haven't seen evidence to show convincingly that the real state of an article can ever be GA-Class without being B-Class, or FA-Class but not A-Class at the same time. The distinction between "real" and "nominal" is, to my mind, very important. I'm happy to continue discussing that, although I am really unlikely to be convinced without concrete examples. Happy‑melon 13:43, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

An interesting example from my experience was Emile Lemoine. The version which passed FAC would not be rated A-Class by the mathematics WikiProject. Now with any example like this, you can say that one side is wrong and it has a "real" quality level, but who decides? In this case, fortunately, the main contributor agreed with my concerns, and improvements were made, but it does illustrate Titoxd's observation below that different communities (in this case a group of FAC reviewiers, and two members of the maths WikiProject) evaluate different issues with different weight. Geometry guy 19:18, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

That is indeed an interesting example, and further proof, as if we needed it, that academic discussion is no substitute for genuine, concrete examples. Anything that we content might be, should be, or just is, correct, is meaningless without supporting evidence... that's how the Greeks concluded that there were only four elements :D. In this case, I'm not familiar with the WPMaths A-Class ratings, but I would certainly be uncomfortable about the article being FA-Class. The prose is not, to my mind, "brilliant" and the structure is imperfect; I read the concerns over sourcing in the FAC, I would have raised similar questions. In my opinion, the article is still borderline now, although less so with the improvements you mention. How would I say this situation should have panned out? The article should not have passed FAC if WPMaths were not happy with it; objections should have been raised, and those objections should have been given considerable weight. I see this as an example of a failure of the assessment process to correctly identify the true quality of the article; It would, as you say, be wrong for anyone to declare one or other side to be wrong; it is quite possible that the true position lies somewhere in the middle. The correct response, I suppose, is FAR where the possibly erroneous FA-Class rating can be reconsidered. Happy‑melon 18:32, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Section break 2

We've always operated here with the premise that assessments can be different between projects, as projects can evaluate different aspects of an article differently. However, from my experience, many projects operate on a "courtesy upgrade" basis, in which, for example, when an article is given GA status, the reviewer updates all of the project's banners, saving lots of people lots of time. I consider those edits to be acceptable and desirable. That said, if for some reason a project considers a promotion of its banner as inappropriate or erroneous, there's always the edit button, and its representatives can change the banner back to the original status. That's one reason why the logs are provided by the WP 1.0 bot. Edit-warring over that reversion would be in very bad taste, IMO. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 08:42, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Exactly. I agree completely with Titoxd and wish to change nothing. It is the principle that matters to this discussion: "projects can evaluate different aspects of an article differently" and hence the "assessments can be different". Most of the time they will be the same, and most of the time courtesy upgrades are helpful, but the principle is still there and it is a long-standing one.

The attempt to reinvent the scheme as a single Wikipedia-wide objective scale is an attempt to change something. I worry that there is little hope of finding a sensible solution to the GA-Class problem while there are editors here who want this kind of change, and the confusion will continue to plague the good articles project. Can anyone give me a ray of hope and go back to the two proposals I made? Either would be better than the status quo, IMO. Geometry guy 18:53, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I for one do not support the first proposal. The second one sounds interesting, as I've always advocating using GA as a pseudo-litmus test of the separation between A's and B's, but it could also be construed as the separation between B's and C's, as A-Class criteria are organically becoming more stringent with the introduction of broader A-Class reviews. I'd like to hear more WikiProjects' opinions about it. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 00:40, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I support the removal of GA-Class from the scale, though probably not right now. Tito and I continue to politely disagree on this, even though I think we both see the scale as having two separate parts - a WikiProject content focus (Stub-Start-C-B-A) and an external style review (GA-FA). I think that GA-Class has been a nuisance for us, because the confusion described here is always with us. FA-Class has never been an issue because it has always been supposed to represent the pinnacle - comprehensive content and perfect style - and its position at the top is uncontested. In contrast, GA doesn't fit perfectly anywhere in the scale (it's above Start and below FA - we can't say anything more definite). I must concede, though, it's also a convenient tag to use when you're assessing things! My goal would be to see a really good scheme that anything that had passed as a good article would show up clearly in the WikiProject lists as that - without the need for anyone to add "GA-Class". I would never advocate removing GA-Class until we find a solution that can garner a clear consensus. Maybe that's something we could work on next year, but we've had other things to focus our energies on this year. And I think I would rather focus energy in 2009 on clarifying and standardising an A-Class content review process, and formalising that an A-Class can't be removed by someone acting without approval of the WikiProject. But that's another discussion for another day (PLEASE!).

I really don't like the second proposal. In principle it's great, but in practice I don't think it would be workable. It would confuse me to find an article tagged as GA yet ineligible to be GA-Class! Unlikely, but it could definitely happen. We already have a problem with people tagging articles as GA-Class for the heck of it (despite NO GAN or anything!) so I think this variation would simply add to the confusion.

I can accept the idea of a "courtesy reassessment", and I think that WP:BIO in particular probably appreciates such things. This is particularly useful in the lower levels and I've done plenty myself. But such things must be done with care; in chemistry we had someone from OUTSIDE the project re-assessing some of our B-Class and A-Class articles as Start-Class based on some technicality in the non-standard WP:MILHIST criteria, rather than using the chemistry assessment scheme that is very close to the 1.0 system. And no one should EVER demote an article from A-Class, IMHO, without raising the issue first on a WikiProject page. Walkerma (talk) 04:25, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

True, there's at least two components to the quality scale, content and style, and they could be assessed orthogonally to each other, but most of the time (at least in my experience), style and content increase gradually somewhat simultaneously, so an article that is GA in style is generally at least B in content. Hence, I think GA is a useful standard pegging point for the scale, similar to how FA demarcates the top of the scale.

That said, you'll probably like this, then... although it does show the different ideologies with respect to the roles of GA and A-Classes when you compare it with this page...

I agree with downgrading A's... don't do it unless you have a very good reason to do it and are willing to defend it. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 06:46, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Whatever the outcome of the discussion above (and I think we should try to keep this section break free from it), I see no confusion that is not due to misunderstanding of what the scale actually is. If WP1.0 ratings are on a project-by-project basis, then there is no inconsistency whatsoever in an article being rated C-Class on one banner and GA-Class on the other. The counter-intuitive nature of the second option is fuel for my argument above, but is irrelevant here; it is a "problem" only if editors continue to believe that it incorrect. If WP1.0 ratings are universal, then one project identifying legitimate flaws in an article should probably preclude it from being lauded by other projects.

I stand by my assertion that an article simply should not have passed a GAC if it would not meet the B-Class criteria, and should be GAR'd. I have still to see any evidence that it is possible, even in theory, for an article that does not meet the B-Class criteria to meet the GA criteria. Without evidence that such a thing is possible, I maintain that this "problem" does not, in fact, exist except in the minds of editors who believe that it can. To briefly cover the examples cited earlier in this thread, Huletts Landing, New York blitzes the B-Class criteria, I think it's a borderline GA but I concur with the general opinion to keep it at GA-Class; I've explained above a similar lack of concern over John von Neumann. Innumerable times here and elsewhere I have heard the axiom that "C/B/A-Class and FA/GA are incompatible, since they assess different things". What are these different things? How can they be genuinely different when they all ultimatley assess article 'quality'? I can accept that some reviews, particularly A-Class, focus more heavily on content, an inevitable (and beneficial) consequence of being assessed by subject-matter 'experts'. GAC and FAC focus more on style and presentation. How does this lead inevitably to the conclusion that they are mutually exclusive? In my mind, the high standards of material and content required for A-Class are implied in the FA-Class criteria. To return to Roger Davies' popular "ping pong" analogy, the complete 1.0 scale is a zig zag, not a straight line, alternating between assessing improvements in content and improvements in style (although some improvement in both is expected). Unless you are prepared to suggest that one class has lower requirements for either content or style than its predecessors, you must conclude that it is impossible to attain one rating without having implicitly met the requirements for all previous classes. Again, I would be fascinated to see evidence that this conclusion is not valid.

So to draw from the original post, I contend that the "problem" with GA-Class does not, in fact, exist. GA-Class articles are those that meet the GA-Class criteria, nothing more or less. A-Class articles are a subset of GA-Class articles just as GA-Class articles are a subset of B-Class articles; any A-Class article that does not meet, at least implicitly, the GA-Class criteria should not be rated A-Class. Note that I do not require that all A-Class articles should be Good Articles, although since they should pass a GAC with flying colours there is really no reason why they couldn't be. Similarly, no article that does not meet the preceding criteria are able to pass the GA-Class criteria, so it is not possible for a "C-Class" article to attain good article status. Happy‑melon 18:12, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Did you mean subset, HM? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:02, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Indeed I did, that rather screwed up the coherence of the argument didn't it! Happy‑melon 19:39, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I find it a bit odd that Happy-melon started a new thread to separate issues from the previous thread, then made a long post, reiterating issues from the previous thread. Never mind. Apparently Huletts Landing, New York "blitzes" B-Class. Well, a very experienced and respected Wikipedian didn't think so. If you look at the scale as universal, Wikipedia-wide, linear, you will never find a counterexample to your belief, because you will apply your own interpretation of the criteria to place articles on this linear scale. Unfortunately, other editors will make different choices, so we have to live and let live a bit. The criteria are not entirely objective, and their interpretation varies from editor to editor, and project to project. Geometry guy 21:04, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Which is why GAC and GAR are designed to involve more than one person. With the greatest respect to Dr Cash, who is the only user to have mentioned C-Class (and therefore the "experienced and respected user" I assume you're talking about, His concerns over depth of content (which I agree raise some doubts about its GA-Class status) are far short of excluding it from B-Class. All that is required for B-Class is that it "contains a large proportion of the material necessary... some sections may need expansion, and some less important topics may be missing. I would find it very hard to argue that this article fails to meet this criterion.

My only purpose in "reiterating" material from above is to note how the discussion above is irrelevant to this specific issue, nothing more. The last thing I want to do is confuse the two threads. You raise an interesting and valid point about individual editors having different interpretations of the criteria and hence of where individual articles fit onto the scale. This is true, and as you know, happens universally. We counter this in two ways: firstly, we make the criteria as clear and generalised as possible, so that they are in no way subject-specific and are as objective as possible, and then we publicise those criteria and educate editors in what they mean. This is done by WP1.0 as well as every WikiProject through their assessment departments. Secondly, we ensure that, where it really matters, assessments are performed by groups of editors of increasing depth and breadth, to enable a consensus-based approach to the problem that is more likely (still not infallible, as we have noted, but more reliable) to find the 'correct' answer. Happy‑melon 08:53, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

This is all fine within your wikiview, in which the scales are universal and objective, but that isn't the consensus. Generalized and non-subject specific criteria are fine for review processes focusing on style, but they don't work for content, where e.g., WikiProject 1.0's B-Class criteria end up being vague and subjective. Consequently many (perhaps most) active WikiProjects have there own style guidelines which they use to judge articles at B-Class. Some even have their own B-Class criteria. In a wikiview where B-Class is universal, and is a requirement for good article status, this effectively adds hundreds of style guidelines to the good article criteria, thus giving the good article process a dull ongoing headache, which regularly erupts into a migraine. All I am asking for is some aspirin. However, it seems now is not the right time to find a solution. Geometry guy 19:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

WIAFA §2 and WIAGA §1.b are generally an important focus of WP:GA and WP:FA, and these are generally irrelevant for the rest of the classification, which focuses on content. I'll refer back to Martin's post on what "quality" is, as it explains better than I can what all the different dimensions of quality are. While I agree that GA and FA and S/S/C/B/A do not occur separately in a vacuum, the processes' different foci do make them slightly incompatible (although I cannot imagine a GA-Class article being anything lower than B-Class myself...) Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:35, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

This is a very nice post. Geometry guy 21:04, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I raised this annoying and long-standing problem again to test the water. I see there's no appetite to solve it at the moment, but am glad to see that the problem is recognised. I encourage prioritising it in 2009. Geometry guy 19:34, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Section break 3

I skimmed the above debate, but it's all way over my head. I know this whole system is massively ingrained and goes back through years of refinement, but it's all so very convoluted. Since 99% of WikiProjects just use the exact same quality scale proposed by Version 1.0, can't they just not have their own assessment scale by default? Every page can be assessed under a unified Version 1.0 scale, and projects by default would use that for cataloging/statistics. Projects that want to write their own assessment scale can use it if they want, and that would be absolutely fine. They would just call it the project's assessment scale. You could have like

This article has been rated A-Class on the Wikipedia Version 1.0 assessment scale. It is under the scope of the following WikiProjects: This article is under the scope of WikiProject Composers, a group of editors dolor sit amet... MID — This article has been rated as a Mid-Importance article on the WikiProject Composers importance scale. This article is under the scope of WikiProject Biography, a group of editors dolor sit amet... HIGH — This article has been rated as a High-Importance article on the WikiProject Biography importance scale. This article is under the scope of WikiProject Math, a group of editors dolor sit amet... B+ — This article has been rated as a B+-Class article on the WikiProject Composers quality scale. MID — This article has been rated as a Mid-Importance article on the WikiProject Composers importance scale.

The end result would be more accurate assessments: Rather than five people each arbitrarily deciding a rating for their own project, they'd have to come to debate/come to a consensus over the one rating (unless, again, their project used a different scale, which I assume most wouldn't). As the article improved, each project would have more accurate statistics (the rating process would be more up-to-date, in other words). It would also be far easier to address the contentious issue of which assessment levels go where. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason why I'm wrong, so what is it?

The added bonus here would be that Version 1.0 could just make a blanket statement that GA-Class = GA, not GA-Class ≈ GA. If GA-Class ≠ GA then I don't see why it's in the scale. It's confusing enough already. —Werson (talk) 19:41, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Concepts for a dedicated "MediaWiki" client application with live update and patrolling tools

Lots of new ideas just made by me that may interest you, and those interested in the project of creation of Wikipedia CD/DVD, and the need to better patrol the contents, work better in teams with supervizors, and enforce the copyright and national legal restrictions.

These new concepts concerns ALL Mediawiki projects, not just those hosted by the Fundation and not just Wikipedia.

See the discussion just started here:
m:Wikipedia on CD/DVD#Concepts for a dedicated "MediaWiki" client application with live update and patrolling tools.

Most probably a new great project to build (I mean, the two applications: the local proxy application and the local client connecting to it; plus minor modifications to the MediaWiki software: to support a few content rating and legal classification tags, and an extension to support a local supervizion within special pages, not needed on the existing online site but installed by default in the distributions).

verdy_p 12:10, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Core Contest winners

Folks here may be interested to hear that there was finally some closure on the Core Contest, which was held one year ago. The winners have been announced and will receive their prizes, and more contests are planned in the future. Walkerma (talk) 08:03, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Relativity, Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Acoustics

They are now taskforces of Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics. How do you deprecate the old WP 1.0 bot monitering of them and implement the taskforce monitoring?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:56, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

There's no difference between how WP1.0 bot treats them, so nothing needs to change. If you want to abandon the Category:FA-Class Relativity articles etc cats, just depopulate them and the bot will stop writing statistics. But I doubt there's a need for that; you mainly need to make sure that all the articles are also categorised under the Physics quality categories, which I assume most/all of them are already. Happy‑melon 11:55, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Alright, so how do you set up the bot to produce the table for these taskforces?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 16:57, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see, you mean that they weren't producing any quality statistics before, and you want them to now? Well, since {{physics}} is a WPBannerMeta banner (:D) it's very easy: you just need to add stuff like this to each taskforce declaration:

 |TF_1_QUALITY       = yes
 |TF_1_IMPORTANCE    = yes
  |tf 1 importance={{{relativity-importance|}}}
 |TF_1_ASSESSMENT_CAT = Relativity articles

And then create all the resulting categories. Happy‑melon 17:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I suppose that if I leave out the importance section, it would work as well?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 20:06, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

You need the |TF_1_ASSESSMENT_CAT= (the indentation is confusing, I've corrected it), but yes, should work fine. Happy‑melon 20:09, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Instructions how to set up thee bot are here. Ruslik (talk) 20:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Article Review

My article, (Petrevene) has recently been listed in several categories:

• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Geography articles by quality/1
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Europe articles by quality/1
• Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Bulgaria articles by quality/1

Does this mean that it has been review by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, and so would I be able to include the banner {{WP1.0}} on its talk page. I doubt it since it looks as it was put there by a bot of some sort, but non-the-less I thought it would be good to know. I would be very grateful to whoever answers my query. Thanks --P.Marlow (talk) 16:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

No, it has not been reviewed by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team. Those pages you linked to are records of the assessments made by different WikiProjects. Editors update the WikiProject banners on the article talk page (as shown here) and then a bot collects the assessments and records them in a log. This is to help projects track changes to their articles and produce statistics to measure their progress. Regards. Road Wizard (talk) 17:13, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much for clearing that up, you've been very helpful to me.

Joining the Wikipedia Editorial Team

Hi everyone. Ive used Wikipedia for very long now, but only started writing and improving articles about a month ago. I wish to help the Ed Team. I am not so good at writing articles, but I am good at sourcing images, citing sources, getting more information on a particular subject, ect. How can I join the Ed Team? Should I just add my name to the list? What else? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Slapsnot (talk • contribs) 07:31, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Just add yourself. There's no formal requirements to join. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 03:22, 7 January 2009 (UTC)