Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Directory

This page was a component of WikiProject X, a project that is now defunct.

To help centralize discussions and keep related topics together, the talk pages for all WikiProject Directory subpages redirect here.

Where are the biology WikiProjects listed?

Such as WikiProject Gastropods? I must be missing something? Invertzoo (talk) 13:00, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Under Science. — Jeraphine Gryphon ^(talk) 15:19, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, under Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Science WikiProjects. The subdivisions under Science aren't that well thought through (not to mention someone re-added Regional and it's sprawling structure therein as a division of Geographical, after I explicitly decided against that... I need to find a way to fix this). The topical directory pages are based on the various categories that WikiProjects are sorted under; before this, the categories never really mattered that much, so not much attention has been paid to them. If a project is not being listed, the solution is to add it to an appropriate category. Harej (talk) 18:37, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see WP Gastropods, Fungi, Microbiology, or Molecular and cell biology. Sasata (talk) 16:55, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Where? there is no section for life-sciences, nor for physical sciences. This directory is not very useful if it leaves out some of the most basic categories or if it is too difficult to find them. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 11:59, 24 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pbsouthwood, those sections are not available because those categories have not been created. I invite people to create better categories to sort WikiProjects under. Harej (talk) 16:06, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What comes first, the section or the category? • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 16:11, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The category comes first; the sections are created based on the categories. Harej (talk) 16:15, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject categorization is in bad shape, generally. By my count we need to create 24 categories to match the system used at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. I am happy to take on this work. Harej (talk) 18:34, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Do you know of a way to get a listing for all the science WikiProjects?

What is the format for the missing categories?

Please explain how to create the appropriate categories so that they can be included in the directory. I have started a list below for missing projects and categories, but I have no idea if the categories are appropriately named. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:40, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pbsouthwood: Only real requirement is that they are created and are sorted into any category named in the style "[word] WikiProjects". For example, "Biology WikiProjects" could be sorted under "Science, technology, and engineering WikiProjects". Harej (talk) 14:47, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That will help. Thanks, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 15:14, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pbsouthwood, I've now created the missing categories. I would recommend looking through User:Reports bot/Uncategorized WikiProjects and seeing what WikiProjects need to be sorted into categories (using Wikipedia:WikiProject directory as a guide). I invite everyone to participate; I will be working on this as well. (Remember that if a WikiProject has its own category, add the categories to that instead of the project page.) Harej (talk) 00:33, 3 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

List of missing projects and categories

Please add those which you can't find in the directory, and strikethrough as they are included in the directory.• • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:43, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Missing projects

Gastropods
Fungi
Microbiology
Ghana
ChildhoodTrauma — Preceding unsigned comment added by OGTeabelly (talk • contribs) 16:32, 2 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Missing categories:

Who is counted as a participant?

I see that Wikiproject Scuba diving has 0 participants listed. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:49, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pbsouthwood: A participant in a WikiProject is someone making two or more edits within a rollng 90 day period to the WikiProject's page, the WikiProject's talk page, or any subpages thereof. Harej (talk) 14:45, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

So being a member of the project and doing large numbers of edits on articles in the project does not count as being active. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 15:11, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Making edits to the articles (and talk pages) tagged by the project is a different measurement—that of the number of subject-area editors, of which you are one for WikiProject Scuba Diving. Harej (talk) 15:36, 30 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I see that. It was a little counter-intuitive, but not illogical. Maybe it should be clarified somewhere on the page. Cheers, • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:20, 31 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

+1 to Pbsouthwood. Xinbenlv (talk) 04:04, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

+1 to Pbsouthwood. I found participant vs editor confusing too. Maybe participants can be renamed active editors? Spidana (talk) 14:01, 4 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Edit counts of subject-area editors

Would it be possible to add the number of edits each editor has made in the subject-area of the project? Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Medicine gives a list of people who have contributed but there isn't an easy way to determine if it may have been only a few edits or dozens. Sizeofint (talk) 07:06, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to ask the same thing. This would be very useful in determining who to invite to become members of a WikiProject. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 12:28, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sizeofint, Stevietheman, I originally excluded this information because I didn't want to make the directory pages into a "leaderboard," with the sense of competition it implies. But I do agree the directory needs to better distinguish between prolific contributors and occasional ones. (For what it's worth, anyone who makes fewer than 5 edits in a subject area within the past 30 days is not included.) I would also like to find a way to distinguish between people who make thousands of edits with AutoWikiBrowser and those who do not make as many edits numerically but with more content. Ideas are welcome. Harej (talk) 16:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think AWB edits are legitimate, but then I'm a biased AWB user. Still, even if an AWB user is cleaning up a lot of pages in my project, it may be possible they are interested in the corresponding subject area. Also, the number of edits is just one piece of info; sometimes fewer edits that are more concentrated on particular pages will be more interesting than a lot of edits that are scattershot. Perhaps if we could get some kind of breakdown on what pages they are editing? Maybe show the top three articles edited by each one, or say "scattershot" if their edits are all over the place (or some combination, like the top two and the rest is scattershot). Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 20:33, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Of course AWB are legitimate. :) But 1,000 edits doing a rote task in AWB does not indicate interest in a subject as, say, 1,000 edits bringing articles up to GA or FA. And I've found with the directory that there's this group of editors that show up in countless disparate WikiProject directory listings because they've taken on some broad task that involves a great many number of pages, and more likely they are interested in categories or what have you than the pages those categories appear on.

One approach we could take to mitigate this is to measure bytes, whether added or removed, instead of number of edits. This is not without its problems but allows you to effectively "weight" edits. We could also give additional weight to talk page edits. Harej (talk) 03:46, 11 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'd rather know what articles they touched per my suggestion. That tells me more about their interests than the volume of changes overall. Are they making significant contributions to key articles from the project, or editing ones along the outer edges (lowest importance) in an ancillary way? That's the sense I want to get. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 11:52, 11 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point about not wanting to make this a leaderboard. Perhaps we could bin the edit counts and display ">5", ">10", ">50", ">100" etc. Sizeofint (talk) 21:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That could work. Harej (talk) 03:46, 11 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Harej: & @Stevietheman: re: leaderboard:

I think adding a leaderboard to WikiProjects would the most effective thing to improve member participation. More or less it's a type of gamification, the addition of a social element and competition in collaboration. Many websites, computer/browser-games (clans etc), real-world projects etc feature such and were successful in increasing participation by it.

Actually I wanted to suggest such a while ago but haven't until now - also because it would be difficult to measure the contributions of members. Simply counting edits isn't any good in evaluating a user's contributions. However there might be a way to get the assessment working in a roughly correct way - e.g. by also checking added bytes, count of created articles & categories, potentially analyzing edits etc and by allowing to sort the leaderboard by multiple indicators. Then, still there's the problem of people basically cheating their way up by e.g. making multiple edits where one would be enough - but that actually might not be a problem as large as I thought as people could be kicked out of a WikiProject, warned or removed from the leaderboard if they indulge in such (and I don't think many would).

If people get feedback, compete with others, can compare their contributions and know that their contributions are recognized and evaluated by others they get motivated more to contribute more. So I'd really support leaderboards for WikiProjects.

--Fixuture (talk) 20:49, 2 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps it would be possible to distinguish between content improvement and maintenance work. Both are important and valuable, but in different ways. Some editors concentrate on one or the other, others do both. The big obstacle as I see it is automatically distinguishing between useful and not useful edits. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:14, 4 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed with Pbsouthwood. Both are important and have their place. We wouldn't want to discourage half of the users/contributors on account of telling them "your edits aren't useful..." PolymathGirl (talk) 00:50, 7 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Distinguishing between useful/not useful is doable, at least to the extent we need to do it. I'm thinking we have different groupings: page creators, addition of textual content, and maintenance tasks such as adding categories or templates. Grouping people in this way lets you invite people to WikiProjects with a tailored invitation based on what they're already doing, or if you need help with a certain thing you have a ready list of people. (For instance: how the hell do chemical infoboxes work? Well, if I have a ready list of people who add templates to chemical articles, I can ask those people!) There are technical tools that can read through individual edits and parse out what kind of edits are being made, and this would be the basis on which the list is produced. What do people think of this? Harej (talk) 01:26, 9 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In principle I like the idea of analysing edit type. Quantity alone is far less meaningful. It would probably also be useful to analyse edits to talk pages as a separate group. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:46, 9 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Opt-in leaderboard

Pbsouthwood, Fixuture, Stevietheman, Sizeofint, I do think it's worth pressing ahead with an idea for a leaderboard, albeit one that is opt in. As far as figuring out how to classify edits, Aaron Halfaker has done work on measuring the "usefulness" of an edit based on how many revisions it survives. For example, an edit that is reverted immediately is not considered useful; content that lasts multiple revisions is considered useful. It's not a perfect metric but it can be automatically calculated. We could probably also use the ORES platform for differentiating between content edits and meta-content/maintenance edits. So if we assume the technical implementation is manageable, we should figure out how we want this leaderboard to look and function. It sounds like our preliminary idea is to have one board for writing text in articles, another for maintenance? What exactly is "maintenance"? Do we have other categories we want to consider? And do we want to find a way to include unranked information as well, for those who have not opted in to the leaderboard (but have not opted out of metrics altogether)? Harej (talk) 21:11, 8 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

An opt-in leaderboard may be a good idea. I think it is a different proposal from what Stevie and I are after though. We're looking to identify editors working in a subject area and invite them to join a WikiProject. Sizeofint (talk) 21:27, 8 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sizeofint, right. This is what the WikiProject description pages do in theory (see e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Women scientists), though it does a poor job distinguishing between heavy content contributors, occasional editors, maintenance folk, etc. We should continue discussing that matter above. Harej (talk) 01:16, 9 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Distinguishing between different types of contributor is probably the most important factor for deciding who to invite to join a project. Heavy content contributors would be top of the list, while anti-vandalism patrollers, vandals, people who delete white space, or correct spelling and punctuation across projects would be bottom of the list. People who contribute to discussions on talk pages are also likely to be worth considering, depending on what they have to say, and how they go about it. • • • Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:46, 9 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Harej: Great to hear! Also I recently created Category:Wikipedia contribution leaderboards where one can find all existing endeavors of that kind. I'd prefer it to be opt-outable instead of having to explicitly opt-in. I don't think it'll work otherwise. It should be enough to make it clear that it's under development and no objective or perfect measure somewhere on top. For measuring the usefulness I'm not sure to what extent that would be possible. For a start it would probably be good enough to have several indicators such as total bytes added (excluding text-removals and reverts), revert/rollback counts, edit counts, assessment-counts, number of categories added/removed, number of new sections created, number of new articles created, etc. Then maybe all these metrics could be cleared off identified abnormalities (e.g. rating down the value of edit-counts if the user edits an article multiple times / with few content added/changed) and somehow normalized for a combined number that gets displayed in addition to these in a sortable table. Analyzing edits for what they changed and measuring how useful they are is probably relatively hard and the algorithm for the cross-metric that summarizes the various indicators can probably improved as it's put into practice (and potentially by researchers).

--Fixuture (talk) 22:36, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Harej: I agree with Fixuture that the leaderboard should be opt-out, as 1) how would anyone find out about opting in (and would most care)?; 2) per 1, we would highly likely have very little if any useful results to work with; and 3) we are all doing public work and should expect to be included in all sorts of stats lists, and these are normally opt-out (AFAIK). As for how we handle the ordering, I think we should make it very simple with two lists, ordered by: 1) number of non-vandalizing edits; 2) amount of bytes added (non-vandalizing, of course). In my view, any non-vandalizing edit is worthwhile and a valid contribution. I would advise against overthinking this. When we review these results lists, we will obviously see the ranks and numbers, and we can drill down to examine better what each user is doing. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:35, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As for how it should look, I propose a partially sortable table of all users who made 5 or more non-vandalizing edits. Data per column:

Username (bold if already a member of the wikiproject)
# of Edits (sortable; initial sort; descending order)
Top 3 edited articles
Bytes added (sortable; sorts into descending order)
Top 3 expanded articles

Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:49, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

From this table, I would like to see a "Top 10" version I can show in the wikiproject itself. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:54, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, it could work like "Popular pages", and we have an "Active contributors" page in each wikiproject that is populated with all the results from month to month. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:56, 4 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProjects not listed in directory

I realize that this has gotten stale, but I have noticed that many WikiProjects are not listed in the directory. Would WikiProjects under parent WikiProjects be listed in the directory? For example, WikiProjects Electronic music, alternative music, etc. are not listed in the directory, but is technically under the scope of WikiProject: Music. Hence should these projects be listed? Blue Adventure (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

...and I have just realized that the directory is listed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. Blue Adventure (talk) 16:38, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Adventure, at the moment, child WikiProjects are not listed alongside parent WikiProjects, at least in this version of the directory. Sorting in this particular directory is based on the WikiProject being in certain categories. Admittedly there is a long way to go before this (auto-updating) directory can replace the Council directory you mentioned. Harej (talk) 17:32, 29 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you for clearing up the confusion! Blue Adventure (talk) 00:46, 30 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pre-sort the table

Could you set the table to be pre-sorted by the number of active participants, rather than alphabetically? I think it would help people find active WikiProjects, and I think that most people will be looking for active groups. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:56, 22 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject [Foo]" pages

Does one have to do anything in particular to get a Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject English language generated? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:49, 4 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory/All

Given the minimal place-holder content of this page, would it be better to redirect straight to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory/All for the moment? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 02:53, 18 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I took a stab at transcluding Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory/All into Wikipedia:WikiProject_Directory to reduce the need to click-through for now, but it seemingly didn't work. Section transclusion also doesn't work. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 05:26, 16 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you. — The Transhumanist 10:55, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

IPs in the WP editor lists

Is there a way to exclude IP editors from appearing on the list of editors in the last 30/90 days? –Fredddie ™ 00:45, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Adding Tree of Life subprojects and taskforces?

Please add the following WP ToL child projects:

Thank you --Nessie (talk) 14:35, 25 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nessie: According to the header on this talk page, you just need to add the main project (or task force) page to a subcategory of Category:WikiProjects by topic. --MarioGom (talk) 21:52, 28 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@MarioGom: they have been. What's the next step? --Nessie (talk) 02:55, 29 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nessie: I think we need to wait until the next update. As far as I can see, the directory update has not been run since 31 July. Hopefully it is only about time. --MarioGom (talk) 07:16, 29 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@MarioGom: these have been in subcategories of Category:WikiProjects by topic since well before 31 July. I feel there is maybe something else to be done? Otherwise they will be overlooked again. --Nessie (talk) 13:47, 29 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nessie: No idea then. Harej or Isarra may be able to help. --MarioGom (talk) 14:30, 29 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I know nothing about this, sorry. Was there a bot that isn't running, or something? -— Isarra ༆ 22:57, 25 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Isarra: looks to be it was Reports bot operated by Harej. --Nessie (talk) 02:30, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted WikiProjects?

Just wondering why Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Korean Mythology exists, given that the associated WikiProject was deleted? PC78 (talk) 09:12, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could we add "active" to the directory?

Hi all. I'm wondering if it would be possible to add an "Active" column to the directory. I assume the easiest way would be to have a bot just read the {{WikiProject status}} parameter or check the category that the template places the project in. Thoughts? Ajpolino (talk) 18:22, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Missing WikiProject Backpacking

This may be a matter of timing as the project was only recently revived. Still, I want to be sure we are included here correctly. —philoserf (talk) 22:34, 11 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Directory has not been updated since February 20, 2020 —¿philoserf? (talk) 07:52, 12 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can we add WikiProject Women in Film and Media

Hello, I believe that women in film and media (i.e. articles about women filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, critics) could be an important topic for a WikiProject Women in .... Lunaandmaya (talk) 13:58, 13 August 2020 (UTC)Lunaandmaya[reply]

List of frequently updated articles

My question is a bit different, but I did not find a place to ask it, and since I'm delving mostly in Arts articles, I thought someone here might have an answer: let's say there is a concept like "List of currently most frequently updated articles" (as would be applied to a pool of articles like a WikiProject for instance). That concept would be qualified as "hot articles", "warm pages", "moving content" or a similar name. Well, that kind of report exists in various Wikis. In French they call it: "Articles chauds" (see an example here). I would expect such reports to be available in the biggest and best Wiki of them all, the English one, because that's a pretty darn useful tool for the management of WikiProjects for example. Unfortunately, I could not FIND anything remotely similar so far, which blows my mind (and my mind does not like to be blown except maybe on Sundays ;-) I am sure such stellarly brilliant participants to this very Englishy Wiki have a NAME for it, a PLACE for it (meaning a bot doing it already), an EXAMPLE of it (a page, yes a link will do please). Most extraordinary what you DON'T find on Wikipedia I shall say! Thanks for any help, Bros, --AlainR345^{Techno-Wiki-Geek} 21:53, 30 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Alainr345:, it's called Hot Articles. Example: Wikipedia:WikiProject Lakes/Hot articles. Not very many WikiProjects have signed up for it (and some CAN'T sign up for it as it is limited to WikiProjects with less than 100,000 articles). The WikiProjects that have signed up for it can be found here:User:HotArticlesBot/Config.json. Plantdrew (talk)

Well, THANKS for that. Like for the French Wikipédia bot, I did not use the Search tool "properly": who would think the User space hides such juicy tenderloins. That's where we see Wikipedia is still such an infant, a little infant in the Middle ages, counting on Retired users for bots, using different bots for doing EXACTLY the same job, each in its own linguistic little tower. What a waste of time. Jimmy should be ashamed somehow: instead of always running for money, he should do more of the job himself maybe (I'm not a fandom ;-) --AlainR345^{Techno-Wiki-Geek} 16:06, 1 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject merged

Hi, WikiProject Dutch municipalities has been merged into WikiProject Netherlands. What should I do with Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Dutch municipalities? Delete, rename, or just leave it alone? Thanks! —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 09:21, 9 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]