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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5

Tagging articles

In assessing articles, I'm wondering if there is any reason we should be putting the Africa Wikiproject tag on a) images, and b) Wikipedia project pages. I can't think of any use in putting the project template on these kind of pages but I would like to know what others think. --BelovedFreak 01:56, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I am removing tags now from the above pages because I can see no use in them being there. --BelovedFreak 18:45, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
We use such tagging at the Scouting project so we can watch for images pending deletion. Chris (クリス) (talk) 05:11, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Ok, that sounds fair enough, although I'm not sure I understand how that works, but if you find it useful... I presume we assess images as class=NA. --BelovedFreak 16:24, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

List of countries by formation dates

Hello everyone! There is a discussion at List of countries by formation dates that concernes this wikiproject. It relates to the fact that some users include former colonies (such as Algeria or Western Sahara) in the columm for the last territorial changes of their respective colonial power, and this because "formely" such colonies were considered "provinces". I believe this discussion and its result may interest you. Thank you! The Ogre (talk) 20:38, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

{{AfricaProject}}

Wow. I'm not sure about the name - something like WPAfrica or WikiProjectAfrica is more conventional - and perhaps you might consider moving it before it's use becomes widespread. But the work that's gone into this and the end result? Amazing.

I guess I'd better think about getting support for this template, and migrating the old templates, into my AWB plugin... gulp. Ask at that page if you need it. --kingboyk (talk) 19:11, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I need a lot of help to turn Economics of cocoa from a POV anti-slavery article to a *good* article

The article Economics of cocoa was originally at "Labor exploitation in the chocolate industry" - It needs a lot of rewriting and it needs to have other info too besides slavery of boys. WhisperToMe WhisperToMe (talk) 04:29, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Gold Coast legislative election, 1951

It is mentioned in a couple of other articles (Kwame Nkrumah being one) that this was the first election under universal suffrage to be held in Africa. Can anyone find a reference for this (I've tried but failed), as it might make a good WP:DYK line. Cheers, пﮟოьεԻ 57 15:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Here's a reference, and I have also found a reference stating that women's suffrage was introduced in 1950. Warofdreams talk 19:17, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
Excellent stuff. I shall nominate it then. пﮟოьεԻ 57 19:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Corruption in Africa - Group Project/Supported???

There is a present Afd debate re the article Corruption in Angola. Looking at the bottom of the article, this appears to be one article in a series proposed by an editor/series of editors. I can't not see how active these editors are in this project, BUT clearly these articles are highly Africa related. Because of the potential POV position of such articles, I think it would be useful if someone from this project could comment on this Afd. Thank You! Rgds, - Trident13 (talk) 02:11, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

History of colonialism

I am not sure of this the best place to raise this issue, so apologies in advance if that is the case - and pleas point me in the right direction!

There is a big problem with the structure of the various articles on colonialism in Africa.

The key article is Colonization of Africa, which covers several thousand years of history. It then (sensibly) links to main articles that expand on each period.

These are:

European exploration of Africa - this has useful material but, of course, it's main focus is on exploration, not early colonialism. The nature of European settlement is therefore not explored, even for the original settler colony in modern day South Africa. It covers up to the mid-late 19th century.

Scramble for Africa. This covers c.1880s-1914 and is dedicated to the carve up of Africa by the European powers. The referring section in Colonization of Africa, however, also discusses the impact of the actual colonial period, c.1900-independence.

Decolonization of Africa discusses (or should) the nationalist movements c.1940 onwards.

This means that the key period of formal colonialism in Africa c.1900-50 has no dedicated article, and is being unsuccessfully shoehorned into other topics!

None of the articles are of high quality and editing is made more difficult by the structural defects surrounding the topic.

Perhaps a single 'European colonialism in Africa' article would be a good interim solution so that these topics could be worked up in a harmonized manner before being split apart again?

Sunjata 22:50, 13 May 2007 (UTC)


I've been struggling with a similar thing for French imperialism in West Africa. There's no real category even: everything is arranged by historical states or Empires with the sub cat of French West Africa (the substate entity which existed 1895-1958) which creates headaches. I'm afraid I'm not bold enough to change big structures on my own, but it would be nice to create Category:European colonialism in Africa and the resulting overview article, and then create subcats by imperial power, then rough geographical area.  :T L Miles 14:07, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
So six months later I got around to doing this. See Category:European Colonisation in Africa, under which I'm creating national sub-cats (i.e. Category:French Colonisation in Africa). I only chose "Colonisation" as opposed to "colonialism" because the uper level cat was Category:Colonisation. Hope this helps stramline things. Just take a look at Category:British Empire to see how spread out and random things currently are. T L Miles (talk) 20:11, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Importance parameter

Could we sort out some guidelines for tagging articles for importance? The country articles are pretty obvious candidates for "top" importance, and have been tagged accordingly. Apart from that, how else do we decide? --BelovedFreak 19:00, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

This is a good question. Actually, there is the possibility of having separate importance parameters for both the individual subproject and the main Africa project. I'm going to try that out a bit later with one of the less complicated banners, like maybe South America, first though. I do know that the WP1.0 people are working on setting up a global importance parameter, based on various factors, and it may be a good idea to maybe wait a few weeks, hoping they'll be done by then, before going into that in earnest. John Carter (talk) 15:17, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

African Countries on friendly terms with the U.S.A.

How exactly does this work. I understand that technically the US has no allies in except for those that are in combat beside US forces. but I know that countries like North Korea are not "allies" even though they are part the UN. so like I said how does this work. and specifically I would like to know about Africa obviously. Arkkeeper (talk) 19:49, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I think you're talking about Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. In general, I think most countries get it by default, with only a few problematic ones being denied it, but I don't know the details of the status of any specific African countries. You might be able to find something on google though. John Carter (talk) 20:32, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
I think I figured it out but thx1138 anyway's. Arkkeeper (talk) 17:08, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Treaty of Tripoli

The Treaty of Tripoli page has gone through some major revisions as of late. Could people weigh in on the issue if the controversy section should be expanded (I say no, because it will just create feuding about "POV balance") and re-examine the page. Also, if there is anything that can be added in regards to North African history, that would help. Thanks. Ottava Rima (talk) 06:20, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Project banner

The Africa Project banner is now set up for differing importance assessments for each relevant country. Please see the Template:AfricaProject for the information on how to perform them. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 00:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Africa barnstar award

I have a brilliant idea. Why don't we make a Africa Barnstar. One of the biggest reasons why people edit is so they can get barnstars.The4532 (talk) 22:04, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

You mean the Africa Award? You can find it at Wikipedia:Barnstars/Barnstar of National Merit. Warofdreams talk 22:13, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
I sincerely hope that this isn't true, though it would explain a lot. - BanyanTree 19:41, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
Hopefully I'm not stepping on toes, but I'm creating a template for the award, which will link back here. I'll add the link when it's functional, and any help from folks who have created such templates is appreciated. T L Miles (talk) 03:52, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
I think this works now: Template:The_AfricaProject_Award. T L Miles (talk) 04:16, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
Isn't that pretty much the same as the one at Wikipedia:Barnstars/Barnstar of National Merit? --BelovedFreak 17:39, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Problems with project banner

I believe the staggering size of the AfricaProject template may be the reason the differential importance assessments aren't working. The server will only support a given number of different switches within a banner, and with the number of quality and importance parameters built into this one, I get the impression that, having tried to have the system produce the variant importance assessments in several incarnations, this banner has reached the limit. If that is the case, then either the different importance assessments will have to be voided, or, alternately, the AfricaProject banner could, potentially, itself be broken up, into "regional" banners, which would have less a problem with size. I'm thinking that, if we were to create subprojects for the five UN regions or some similar subdivisions, the problem should be conquerable with that because the size problem won't be so bad. Opinions? John Carter (talk) 01:18, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Is it possible to replace the country-specific importance tags with a generic "country-importance" field, specifying in the instructions that individual users should consider how important the article is in the context of the country to which it is most relevant? For example, for the article Egypt, the code of the project banner would not be:
{{AfricaProject
 |importance=Top
 |class=A
 |Egypt=yes
 |Egypt-importance=Top
}}
but would instead be:
{{AfricaProject
 |importance=Top
 |class=A
 |country=Egypt
 |country-importance=Top
}}
I think that would create a problem with categorisation, but it might be possible to resolve if the category title is made a function of the value of the "country" parameter. – Black Falcon (Talk) 19:17, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
By the way, the discussion at #Add importance parameter may also be relevant; perhaps parameters to assess importance are not needed in the first place? Black Falcon (Talk) 19:18, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
I certainly have no objection to removing the importance parameter altogether. Regarding the "country-importance" possibility, that would still be a "switch" of a kind, if a dependent one. I am going to try to see if I can separate out the country specs into a "subpage" of the banner today, but can't make any guarantees that doing so will change anything. If what I said doesn't make a lot of sense to you, that's probably because it doesn't to me either, but Template:Africa/Class adjusted for geographic terms is more or less what I was thinking of there. John Carter (talk) 13:56, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't really understand the ins and outs of the template, so can't comment on most of the above. As far as the importance parameter goes, I would not mind if we didn't have it, although I know some editors find it useful. If we did get rid of it, we could have a "core list" of the articles that we consider most important, and each country project could have its own core list. I know that's what some other projects do and it seems to work.--BelovedFreak 18:03, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
My main concern with retaining the importance parameter is the associated backlog. Per the statistics at Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/Assessment, >95% (7300+) of articles tagged with the project banner lack an importance assessment as opposed to about 20% (1400+) that lack a quality/class assessment. Of course, there is no deadline on assessment, so perhaps that's not too much of an issue. – Black Falcon (Talk) 18:15, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Automatic bot banner placement

It would be possible to get the banner automatically placed on all the articles in the Category:Africa, including the appropriate national tag on most of them as well. The one major disadvantage, of course, is that we would quickly have several thousand articles to assess. In any event, would the members of the project favor such bot assisted banner placement or not? John Carter (talk) 14:50, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

I definitely think this would be a good idea. It would indeed make a daunting task for assessing all those articles, but it would be worth it in the end. It saves going through the categories for each country & adding the tag manually which I had done for a couple of countries, and I suspect others were doing. Once the tag is added, half the job is done. --BelovedFreak 18:06, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Stubbing Madagascar communes

I recently stumbled on on-line Malagasy census data for the 1,000+ communes, almost all of which are missing. Before starting creating Malagasy-cruft in earnest, I finished (almost) one region as a test. The easiest way to navigate is {{Diana Region}}. I'm using a little program, which produces the text based on the census database, so it is not exactly FA-class prose. Any comments, criticism or general nitpicking is most welcome! Now it's just a little mess for me to clean.

I'm not really sure which would be the correct term to use here - many english text use commune (which of course is french word). Town/Municipality/commune? Commune urbaine is used for some of the larger cities, so there is an official distinction between the largest ~50 cities and their rural cousins. – Sadalmelik (talk) 22:26, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Fix Cote d'Ivoire & Angola pls

As title, somebody broken the tp, fix it and debug it. Matthew_hk tc 20:17, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

List of African ethnic groups is a mess

I recently came to the page List of African ethnic groups through dealing with vandalism on that page. I noticed this edit [1] which I don't think is vandalism but has made a complete mess of the page. It looks to me as if this information has been dumped in from another wiki. The templates mostly do not exist on english wiki and the ones that do are doing something stupid. I think all the templates need deleting (or possibly turned into regional sub-headings) and the ethnic groups merged with the main list. However, I have no knowledge of the subject at all and this could be a complete hoax for all I know.

To clean up the page, I have removed the inserted data to the article talk page while it is discussed. If some-one wants to leave a note on my talk page confirming you want to keep this data in the article, then I would be happy to work on it. But I need confirmation that the data is actually correct before I will do it. SpinningSpark 12:35, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Archiving

Would anyone object to setting up an automated archiving system for this talk page? User:MiszaBot II handles this function for many pages in the "Wikipedia talk:" namespace, and automatic archiving can be easily enabled by transcluding User:MiszaBot/config on this page. A basic configuration could be: 

{{User:MiszaBot/config
|algo = old(60d)
|archive = Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Archive %(counter)d
|counter = 1
|maxarchivesize = 100K
}}

This configuration would archive any section which has not been edited in the last 60 days to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Archive 1, and would build up the archive to a maximum size of 100K, at which point it would create another archive page (i.e. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Archive 2). The parameter values can, of course, be changed. Thoughts? Black Falcon (Talk) 23:44, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Enabled. Black Falcon (Talk) 00:31, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Header for Portal:Africa

There is currently a discussion regarding the choice of header for Portal:Africa (compare the original header to the current header). Interested editors are invited to share their thoughts on the matter here. – Black Falcon (Talk) 00:28, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

List of basic Africa topics

Is this list complete? If you find links, or think of sections, that belong on this list, please add them.

This list is a rudimentary table of contents (and overview) of Africa-related material on Wikipedia, and is part of Wikipedia's Table of contents system.

Maintaining it is an important duty of this WikiProject. Be sure to add it to your watchlist.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist 22:17, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

History of Cape Colony from 1870 to 1899 FAR

History of Cape Colony from 1870 to 1899 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. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Peter Andersen (talk • contribs) 17:15, 11 January 2008

AfricaProject: Articles of unclear notability

Hello,

there are currently 12 articles in the scope of this project which are tagged with notability concerns. I have listed them here. (Note: this listing is based on a database snapshot of 12 March 2008 and may be slightly outdated.)

I would encourage members of this project to have a look at these articles, and see whether independent sources can be added, whether the articles can be merged into an article of larger scope, or possibly be deleted. Any help in cleaning up this backlog is appreciated. For further information, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability.

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the Notability project page or on my personal talk page. (I'm not watching this page however.) Thanks! --B. Wolterding (talk) 16:43, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Progress

I fixed up those that I could find some info for. These which seem possibly notable remain:

Ballad Zulu, Zambian singer, has text newspaper citations, MAY be notable.
Naaz Coker, Tanzanian born chair of a UK National Health Service Trust, but written like a promo piece. MAY be notable.
Mike Kennedy Sebalu, member of Pan-African Parliament, Uganda. MAY be notable, but there's no more content than that.

So I've done what I can. If these articles are worth keeping, folks with the requisite background need to jump in. T L Miles (talk) 19:32, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I think Naaz Coker is notable, but the text of the article seems to have been copied from http://www.beaconfellowship.org.uk/2003_scrutineers.asp or http://www.mcb.org.uk/article_detail.php?article=announcement-568. While an article on her may be warranted, it's probably better to delete the copyright infringing versions and start over. I've tagged the article for speedy deletion under criterion G12 (copyright infringement). Black Falcon (Talk) 19:59, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
Deleted. Black Falcon (Talk) 20:14, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Mike Kennedy Sebalu - Belovedfreak has added some references to the article and I have removed the tag from the article. As a member of a national parliament, Sebalu is virtually guaranteed to be notable. Black Falcon (Talk) 21:43, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Ratings changes for African country articles

FYI: In the past six months, there have been four changes in the "class" ratings of African country articles:

See Portal talk:Africa/Countries/Selected country for a full listing of African country ratings. (Please take the information with a grain of salt, since ratings are generally (except in the case of GA and FA) given based on the judgment of a single editor.) Black Falcon (Talk) 22:01, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

List of African countries

Sometime ago i made a sortable list of African countries, which i think would be a more useful than just a plain list of the countries that is currently at List of African countries. It pretty much incorporates List of African countries in order of geographical area, List of African countries by GDP per capita, List of African countries by population into one list. Chris_huhtalk 00:43, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I think it effectively replaces List of African countries in order of geographical area and List of African countries by population (the "GDP per capita" list could be modified to stand on its own...). Though I don't think there's any question that the list you created is a substantial improvement over the current List of African countries, I was wondering what you would think about making a few changes, such as adding "map", "conventional long form name", and "domestic name" columns (see List of countries in Europe). Black Falcon (Talk) 21:51, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I like the idea of a map (or location) and other things could be useful, i will try some but too many will make it a bit squashed. I think Conventional long form name, and even domestic name would take less precedent over GDP, language etc if it because too cluttered. Would you think it would be best to simply replace List of African countries with this list. I feel the current one just doesn't have nearly as much info as it could.Chris_huhtalk 16:20, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
The problem of clutter could be ameliorated to some extent by omitting the GDP data (looking over some other lists of countries by GDP per capita, I think that there's enough information to make List of African countries by GDP per capita a stand-alone list). That said, yes, I support replacing the current List of African countries with the list you've developed. In terms of the information contained in each, there is simply no comparison... Black Falcon (Talk) 17:02, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I've added the maps and the Official name in English after the name. As this is designed to be a simple reference page to compare the countries in Africa i think Domestic long name etc is too much information. If someone is interested in that they could go to the country page itself. GDP could go, but i think it is a useful statistic to keep to compare the countries. I think List of African countries by GDP per capita is useful by itself, but GDP fits ok into this page (at least at 1024) and is useful i think. I'm surprised that the other list of continents countries are just the names of the countries. Chris_huhtalk 16:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
It looks great! And I think you're right about the GDP data ... if there's enough room in the table, there's really no reason to remove the information. Black Falcon (Talk) 16:56, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
What should we do now? I left a message on the talk page for List of African countries several months ago and got no reply. Should i just switch it over, or can you think of anythign else to add. I also started work on an Asian one too. Also i have just noticed on the current list there are dependancies listed too, i might add them first (and give the row a different bg colour). Chris_huhtalk 17:12, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I think you should just go ahead and replace the page. I don't think anyone would contest that the change would improve the list of countries and there's been plenty of time for any opposition to be voiced... Black Falcon (Talk) 18:16, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Done. Chris_huhtalk 14:45, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
Great! With some minor tweaking, it seems to me that this could meet the featured list criteria. (I'm not a featured content reviewer, but it seems to match of all of the requirements: "useful, comprehensive, factually accurate, stable, uncontroversial and well-constructed", a "concise lead section", and images.) Black Falcon (Talk) 17:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The 153rd episode of "Côte d'Ivoire" vs "Ivory Coast"

Some editor came along, decided it was obviously Ivory Coast not Côte d'Ivoire, and solved this problem in two minutes flat by ignoring the talk page and just moving it. While efficient, it ignores the ENDLESS discussion of this on Talk:Côte d'Ivoire (or somewhere, I don't remember anymore). I folks could weigh in, decide which is right, and form some concensus either way, please do. Thanks. T L Miles (talk) 19:22, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, as per WP:NAME, "Ivory Coast" is the more common name, and probably should be the name used. It's also a lot easier to type, without the diacritical marks. Personally, I'd prefer that option, but that's just one opinion. John Carter (talk) 19:29, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
At the moment, I don't have a strong preference for either "Côte d'Ivoire" or "Ivory Coast" (I'd have to read the previous discussions, look at various sources, etc.), but proposals to rename the article to Ivory Coast failed here and here. Black Falcon (Talk) 19:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The editor has been blocked as a suspected sockpuppet of a banned user. Black Falcon (Talk) 07:16, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It's one of the few countries that the non-English version is accepted usage, both official and informal, in English. It's not the same thing as naming the article on Warsaw, "Warszawa," because, in this last case, Warszawa is not an accepted foreign name in English. Just do a google search on English language pages, some time, for "Côte d’Ivoire" versus "Ivory Coast." Folks get all tied up when things are irregular--order, they cried out for. It's been that way forever, it must remain. Etc. Fact is, "Côte d’Ivoire" is an accepted name in English for the country once and also known in English as Ivory Coast. It can only have one name on en.Wikipedia, and "Côte d’Ivoire" is accepted English. --Blechnic (talk) 03:51, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The 154th episode

See diff, as User:Proxy User removes citation of name change, and rewrites article to say Ivory Coast is the accepted name. In the background you may hear the sound of my head banging the desk... T L Miles (talk) 17:13, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

And as an aside, I reverted it once, he reverted it back without comment, so someone else can handle it. T L Miles (talk) 17:35, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Reverted, once more. Black Falcon (Talk) 23:45, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Assessment backlog

We currently have two assessment backlogs:

  1. A backlog of ca. 2000 articles (18% of all tagged Africa articles) that need to be evaluated for class (i.e. quality), and
  2. A backlog of ca. 10000 articles (92% of all tagged Africa articles) that need to be evaluated for importance.

I don't think there's any easy way to reduce the "importance" backlog, as importance is something that requires evaluation of context and judgment. (Probably the only easy way to reduce that backlog is to remove the "importance" parameter from Template:AfricaProject - see relevant discussions here, here, here, and here - but it does seem to have some usefulness.) However, there are some things we can do about the "class" backlog. For instance, we could:

Is there support for one or both of these actions? If so, we could file a bot request to have this done.

Before we submit a bot request (assuming there is adequate support), we may also wish to consider the title of Template:AfricaProject - see, for instance, the comment left here, in the section titled {{AfricaProject}}. I suppose that, ultimately, it doesn't matter too much what the template is called, but it may be something worth considering before we ask a bot operator to tag up to 2000 talk pages (again, assuming there is support for automatic assessment). – Black Falcon (Talk) 07:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

These both seem like very good ideas. I've been trying off an on to do this manually, and while most of these unassessed articles are stubs, there are a few starts and even "b"s in there, mostly assessed by other projects. As for the name, I have no strong feelings: the ones who'll have to do the graft of changing things should have the final say. T L Miles (talk) 16:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
(2 days later...) Great! I'll post the request shortly. Black Falcon (Talk) 19:07, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Done. Black Falcon (Talk) 19:09, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Is this a good idea, assigning the importance of a topic to one area to another? For example, major plant pathogens may be improtant to plant articles, but even if they impact an economic crop of Nigeria, they might not be of top importance to Wiki Project Africa. stub is good, though. What is the assessment scale, anyway? --Blechnic (talk) 03:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

My understanding is that the bot will assign a Quality assessment based on other current assessments of the article (assuming these is no AfricaProject assessment), not an importance assessment. Importance will have to be done manually, for the reasons you quite rightly point out.T L Miles (talk) 03:53, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I see, I misunderstood. Thank you for clearing it up. I changed a couple of your assessments, or maybe only one, the Rap dogba one to Low rather than Mid. --Blechnic (talk) 03:56, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

User:John_Bot appears to be doing this job, but it (from a quick look) MAY be breaking the assessments. The bot appears to be "preparing" the assessments by removing previous assessments. In some case thais happens AFTER the same bot has auto placed stub assessments (I assume following topic stub tags). The upshot it that the bot is removing AP assessmements and leaving previously assessed articles unassessed. see this and this as recent examples. I left a note on the operators talk page, but an admin probably should take a look at the logs and stop the bot if needed. T L Miles (talk) 13:45, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it's screwing up. look at this diff. It takes Talk:Anglo-Zulu War, rated Start class by Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history, but no AfricaProject assessment (blank AP tag). The bot rates it B class (for some reason), with the description "m (Bot: Assessing article (b))". Then it replaces the tag it updated with "AfricaProject|class=|importance=| class=" and the description "m (Bot: Fixing template for easy assessment)". It's clearing the tag AFTER it rates it, so it should be stopped ASAP. I left a message of the owners talk page, but I can't force a stop, though any admin can. T L Miles (talk) 01:17, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
A bit similar thing here [2] too, but the bot didn't clear tag afterwards. BTW, John Bot is an AWB bot, so it should stop when somebody edits its talk page. Never tried that myself, though. Cheers, – Sadalmelik (talk) 17:51, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
The bot owner recognized the error, stopped the Bot the night of May 1, and says he'll fix it before he resumes. We should probably catalog those tags which were wiped, though. I'll try to fix what I can manually. T L Miles (talk) 19:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It seems there has been a change of bots, and Betacommand (& BetacommandBot) will take care of this job now. – Sadalmelik ☎ 06:10, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

FA update: Cyclone Elita

The article about Cyclone Elita, a tropical cyclone that affected Madagascar in January–February 2004, was promoted to featured article status on 9 April 2008, bringing the total number of Africa-related featured articles to 33 (plus at least one featured list). – Black Falcon (Talk) 00:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Template

This template should not default to alphabetical order, or there should be some way to over-ride it. For example, the article on Dagara people should list Ghana first, so I listed Ghana=yes, then Burkina Faso=yes, but it shows Burkina Faso first. This should be removed, or be an option. Some pages will be far more important to one country than the next, and the most important country should be listed first on the template. --Blechnic (talk) 03:04, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that the ordering of flags should be taken as an indicator of relative importance to one country or another. The template merely identifies that the article is supported by both country-specific WikiProjects. Black Falcon (Talk) 04:08, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Unfortunately it is not whether or not you or I take it as such, but in general, when things of a like kind are ordered in a list, the most important thing is listed first. This is the impression the reader of the article will get, that one is more important than another if only two are listed. Sometimes it will matter, sometimes it will not. But why default to alphabetical anyhow? --Blechnic (talk) 04:15, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
The alphabetical order comes from the order of #ifeq-statements on Template:AfricaProject. I don't it's possible to modify the templete to do what you suggested, at least without modifying all the 10,000+ talk pages where it is currently transcluded. Also I think the size and complexity of the template is already close to the limits set by the software (see Wikipedia:Template limits), so increasing the complexity of the template is not an option. It is already one of the most complex (if not the most complex) of wikiproject banners. So in the end changing the order is a huge job for little or no practical gain, and may not be possible at all. – Sadalmelik ☎ 18:47, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Featured content update: AIDS, Image:Rose Geranium.jpg

The article AIDS was demoted from featured article status on 18 May 2008. There are currently 32 Africa-related featured articles and 1 Africa-related featured list.

Image:Rose Geranium.jpg, a high resolution photograph of Pelargonium graveolens—a plant species indigenous to various parts of southern Africa—was promoted to featured picture status on 13 May 2008. There are currently 24 Africa-related featured pictures which are included in the "Featured picture" queue for Portal:Africa.

–Black Falcon (Talk) 06:20, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Draft Guidelines for Lists of companies by country - Feedback Requested

Within WikiProject Companies I am trying to establish guidelines for all Lists of companies by country, the implementation of which would hopefully ensure a minimum quality standard and level of consistency across all of these related but currently disparate articles. The ultimate goal is the improvement of these articles to Featured List status. As a WikiProject that currently has one of these lists within your scope, I would really appreciate your feedback! You can find the draft guidelines here. Thanks for your help as we look to build consensus and improve Wikipedia! - Richc80 (talk) 19:04, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

U.S. embassies

I'm not sure where to list new articles/stubs for this project, so I thought I'd add it here. Embassy of Senegal in Washington, D.C.. I have several more coming later this week.

Articles of unclear notability as of 24 May 2008

There has been another database update and this time there are 11 Africa-related articles that are tagged as having unclear notability. For more details, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Notability#Feedback on per-project listings. I've copied the list below. –Black Falcon (Talk) 16:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Architecture of Africa - Does it need splitting?

There has been a persistent vandal that has been trying to split the Architecture of Africa article into two, one based on North African architecture, and another on Sub-Saharan architecture. Her argument being that the two are distinctly different and unrelated, with North African bearing traits of South Mediterranean architecture and Sub-Saharan with not much. I personally don't see much issue with keeping both in a single article, as the article itself is not very long in the first place, and there is plenty of space to point out the division in style from North and Sub-Saharan within the article itself without having to split it. Only problem is her insistence on splitting it is mostly on grounds that bunching both together robs Mediterranean people of their achievements and benefits Black Africans. No idea what that's about though. Anyone want to chime in on this? Chan Yin Keen | Talk 21:45, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Whites in Zimbabwe GA Sweeps Review: On Hold

As part of the WikiProject Good Articles, we're doing sweeps to go over all of the current GAs and see if they still meet the GA criteria and I'm specifically going over all of the "Culture and Society" articles. I have reviewed Whites in Zimbabwe and believe the article currently meets the majority of the criteria and should remain listed as a Good article. I have left this message at this WikiProject's talk page so that any interested members can assist in helping the article keep its GA status. In reviewing the article, I have found there are a few issues that may need to be addressed, and I'll leave the article on hold for seven days for them to be fixed. I have left messages on the talk pages of the main contributors of the article and other related WikiProjects. Please consider helping address the several points that I listed on the talk page of the article, which shouldn't take too long to fix if multiple editors assist in the workload. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 06:13, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

I have also reviewed Fair trade and have placed the article on hold. Please consider helping to address the issues raised on the talk page. Happy editing! --Nehrams2020 (talk) 20:51, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 2384 articles assigned to this project, or 13.0%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 18 June 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 11:57, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

C-Class introduced, aparently

A new Assessment class is being rolled out across English Wikipedia C-class. If you assess articles, please look at the new assessment scale at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. Some Africa Sub-projects already have C-class categories, see Category:C-Class_articles. The current Africa Project Tag does not yet seem to be able to handle this. Folks should follow this process, and we can see when we can begin tagging Africa Project articles. Is there anything us laymen editors can do to help implement this? T L Miles (talk) 03:22, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree that we should add class C assessments to the current template since WikiProject Africa already has Class C in its quality guide. I've created a new template that's the same as the old one except that it supports C-class assessments; it's at User:Merenta/NewAfricaTemplate. I've tested it and am pretty sure it's correct, but (of course) welcome criticism. Should there be a consensus to support class C assessments in our template, feel free to use the one that I've created. Since the template is protected, I can't do this myself; it requires admin action. Cheerio and happy editing! Merenta (talk) 18:23, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Rename proposal for the lists of basic topics

This project's subject has a page in the set of Lists of basic topics.

See the proposal at the Village pump to change the names of all those pages.

The Transhumanist 09:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

  • The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
  • The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
  • A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 22:25, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/Madeira work group

Hello everyone. Could you please come to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Madeira work group and participate / help? Thanks! The Ogre (talk) 14:59, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Mustafa Tajouri

An article, albeit a stub at moment, which I created has been put up at Afd. The article being Mustafa Tajouri. Tajouri is the Ambassador of Libya to Russia, and only a few sources can be found on this highest level diplomat from Libya - those sources being in English and Russian. As Tajouri is Libyan, it is likely there are going to be sources for information out there in Arabic, however, not understanding Arabic, I can't find and add these sources to the article. If any of this project members could take a look and see if they can find any info on this ambassador, and add it to the article. There are going to be a heap of ambassador articles on subjects from Africa, and they are forming part of this article I am working on developing. Also if someone could add the name in Arabic to the article, and correct it if incorrect, that would be good too. On a small sidenote, Category:Articles needing Arabic script or text has more article in it which I have created and also need names in Arabic. Ambassadors are high level representatives of their nations, and they have likely had a multitude of credentials for which they were appointed to the position in the first place, it's just finding the info that can be difficult, and it is important to fight systematic bias to have articles on these ambassadors. We need editors help. Thanks. --Россавиа Диалог 19:14, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

C-Class Assessment Added to Banner

I have created a new Africa Project banner template (currently at User:Merenta/NewAfricaTemplate) that's the same as the current one, but it also supports C-class assessments (at subproject level as well as at main project level). As discussed in other parts of this page, the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team has created this new class and indeed, there are already C-class articles in some Africa Project subprojects.

I propose that this new banner template replace the current one. If there are any objections to this, please reply on this page. If there are no objections after a period of at least three days, or if consensus has been reached following objections, I will request that an administrator move the template. Cheerio and happy editing! Merenta (talk) 14:49, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. The banner looks good, and we can use the C-class functionality. Thanks for doing this. T L Miles (talk) 15:45, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 Done Thanks for your efforts, PeterSymonds (talk) 17:22, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Divider line in {{AfricaProject}}

{{editprotected}}

Could the ---- near the end of the {{AfricaProject}} template be removed or put inside some noinclude tags as it's adding ad extra dividing line between talk banners when there is more than one one on a page.

Also the [[Category:WikiProject Africa templates]] at the end should also be removed as it's included in the documentation page and at the moment it's including every page using this template in that category.

Thanks. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:51, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Done. Although in the future the editprotected template should be placed at the talk page of the page to be edited - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 16:49, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I would have put it on the proper talk page, but that talk page redirect here! -- WOSlinker (talk) 20:13, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

African Protected Areas task force

Hi there. I 've made a suggestion to several editors who edit national park articles in Africa that is would a good idea to set up a task force to specifically improve coverage in coordination with WikiProject Protected areas. If you are interested in joining please sign your name and leave a note if possible.


Interested wikipedians

Featured content update - 6 August 2008

Last update (25 May 2008)

Featured articles

There are currently 34 Africa-related featured articles.

Featured lists

There are currently 4 Africa-related featured lists.

Featured pictures

There are currently 25 Africa-related featured pictures which are included in the "Featured picture" queue for Portal:Africa.

–Black Falcon (Talk) 19:07, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Ratings changes for African country articles

Last update (2 April 2008)

In the past four months, there have been three changes in the "class" ratings of African country articles:

See Portal talk:Africa/Countries/Selected country for a full listing of African country ratings. –Black Falcon (Talk) 19:21, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

FL-Class categories in Template:AfricaProject

While compiling the information in the section above, I noticed that WikiProject Africa did not have a category for featured lists (I have now created Category:FL-Class Africa articles). I was bold and added categories for the "FL" parameter in Template:AfricaProject (see diff). –Black Falcon (Talk) 19:49, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Consolidation of African country WikiProject banners

Template:AfricaProject was recently revised, and now contains parameters for all African countries. For the sake of consistency, completeness, and efficiency (to avoid redundant tagging and reduce the number of templates involved), I propose that all uses of the individual African country WikiProject banners be replaced with {{AfricaProject}}. Any thoughts? (If there is consensus for this change, a bot would be able to do most of the work...)

To clarify what I mean, let me provide an example. Under this proposal,

{{WikiProject Algeria |class=Stub |importance=Low}}

would be replaced with

{{AfricaProject |class=Stub |importance= |Algeria=yes |Algeria-importance=Low}}

This change would not affect how the article is categorised for WikiProject Algeria, but would add the article to Category:Stub-Class Africa articles. In addition, it would allow standardisation of the WikiProject banners and the phasing out of the individual country banners. Black Falcon (Talk) 00:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

This sounds like a very good thing, assuming Nigeria Project, Chad Project, etc are cool with it. I'm always worried about changing these to africa tags with the national modifier, but I've not yet gotten a complaint from doing so. It would be a pretty simple bot job to do as well. T L Miles (talk) 14:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I could post notifications to the affected projects, if you think that would be a good idea. Most already use {{AfricaProject}}, but the following have individual project templates:
Black Falcon (Talk) 15:07, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I must admit, I thought that had already been done. Definitely a good idea, with the blessing of the members of those projects, of course.--BelovedFreak 17:09, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I have sent out notifications to all 15 WikiProjects. Black Falcon (Talk) 23:31, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose per previous discussion. To reiterate part of what was said, if the concern is to reduce banner clutter, then it would make more sense to eliminate the Africa WikiProject Banner not those of the countries. We don't do this for any other continent; for example, China, France and Mexico don't have Asia, Europe or North America project banners at all. Otherwise, a banner shell will do the trick. — Zerida ☥ 01:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Support Africa isn't any other continent, so I'm not sure why it matters what other continents it's done for. It's been very handy for me to find stubs in either Africa, general, or by the various West African countries I'm interested in. Is banner clutter a concern? Why have two, when one serves the same purpose? --Blechnic (talk) 02:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
  • It would seem reasonable to me that well supported national projects wouldn't wish to consolidate their assessments. Most African projects, sadly, are not well supported. If the active editors for WikiProject_Egypt would like for us to keep our mitts off their banner, we should. But for Egyptian articles with Africa wide importance, we should place nested AP tags as well. If other projects feel the same, I think that's why we asked first. Please keep us updated on what WikiProject_Egypt decides and what the response on other projects is. T L Miles (talk) 02:24, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
I think this is the only to go for those projects, like WP:EGYPT, that have no consensus for a consolidation of their templates. The banner shell in any event is a neat way of organizing talk pages irrespective of the number of banners used. — Zerida ☥ 21:21, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
  • I have already replaced the articles that had the Wikiproject Sierra Leone banner on with the Wikiproject Africa banner. There were only a couple as the project had only just started tagging articles before the seperate importance parameters on the Africa banner were sorted out. Does the Sierra Leone banner need deleting as its not being used anymore? --Kaly99 (talk) 19:54, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Support This seems like a good idea to me- I've been tagging articles for WP Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea recently, and the tag bloat at the top of the discussion pages for some article is getting to be too much. My only concern is that the articles still be categorized as being part of the respective country project, and from the looks of things in the Sierra Leone project where they've already converted, that requirement is met. I understand concerns about countries not being lumped together into "Africa", but this change only affects the tag, not the individual groups themselves. Rjhatl (talk) 22:27, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Question Does this template support multiple projects? In other words would, say
{{AfricaProject |class=Start |importance= |Eritrea=yes |Ethiopia=yes |Eritrea-importance=Low|Ethiopia-importance=Low}}
be a legitimate combination? -- llywrch (talk) 04:55, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
Sure. The tag shows the general "importance" on the talk page, and on and they show up with the project specific importance. These (and only these) will show up as the importance rank at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Eritrea. There are not Eritrea specific importance rankings yet, so I just added "Eritrea-importance=Top" to Talk:Eritrea. When the assessments updat, you should see it. T L Miles (talk) 15:43, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Any thoughts about how to proceed? While I think it's fair to say that consolidation shouldn't occur for a template such as {{WikiProject Egypt}}, which is associated with an active and well-supported WikiProject, shall we move ahead on (some of) the other ones? –Black Falcon (Talk) 03:10, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I would wholeheartedly support going ahead with this. It's been more than a month that notice has been given, and those projects which wish to opt out will remain untouched. All changes will be reversible if people object at a later date, and I've even seen folks from the Chad project changing their tags manually already. I think, barring new opposition from dormant projects between now and when the bot is ready, we're good! Thanks for taking this on, Mister Falcon... T L Miles (talk) 13:41, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
I just did the conversion for {{WikiProject Equatorial Guinea}} (diff), and it seems that the consolidation can be done relatively quickly using AutoWikiBrowser. (It takes a bit of tinkering at the start, but it becomes rather easy once all the replacement commands are set up.) What should be done with the templates that are orphaned? I'm leaning toward speedy deletion under criterion G6 (housekeeping) since the templates are, after all, just tools for project maintenance, but I don't want to be too bold. –Black Falcon (Talk) 17:09, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Great work, I think orphaned templates should be deleted under the housekeeping criteria as they are no longer needed. Do any of the individual project pages need their assessment sections updating to indicate the use of the Africa rather than individual banners? If people think it's needed I can replicate and customise the information I added to Sierra Leone assessments for the other projects.--Kaly99 (talk) 18:22, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
I'll update any incoming links from assessment sections (and elsewhere) as I do the replacements; however, detailed instructions (which are missing in some cases) may be useful. –Black Falcon (Talk) 15:29, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I started replacing a few transclusions of Template:WikiProject South Africa today, but I just noticed this discussion here. Is this template now deprecated or not? --- RockMFR 21:01, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

It is. The Africa Project banner provides separate assessment functions for South Africa, and, as several articles deal with subjects that cross current borders, it kinda makes sense to use the one banner and reduce the total number of banners on a given talk page. John Carter (talk) 21:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

(Posting a comment so that the section is not archived) –Black Falcon (Talk) 02:34, 8 August 2008 (UTC) P.S. I will be resuming (I was on break during June and July) this task with AWB in the coming days. Also, I checked the talk pages of the notified projects and there still have been no objections between the time the notices were posted and now.)

Comment wanted.

Please comment on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arathi. Is Arathi as mentioned in Githieya's, "The Formation and Development of the Arathi," The Freedom of the Spirit: African Indigenous Churches in Kenya, related to Aarti? This request is cross posted into WikiProject:religionTaemyr (talk) 14:26, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/Protected areas task force

A new task force has been created The Bald One White cat 15:52, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

LANG template

Please be aware of {{lang}}, for marking up non-English words or phrases. Thank you. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 18:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Africa

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 22:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

African cinema task force

An African cinema task force has been proposed at WikiProject Films. Interested editors are encouraged to sign up - if there is enough interest, then the task force will be created! Many thanks, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 03:14, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

African Nationalism Article

I just took a look at this, a glance. It has four tags on it, but when I read the first sentence of the definition of African Nationalism there, I figured it needed another one, a humour tag.Gallador (talk) 17:24, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Africa/Archive_2&oldid=1144741773"