Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/July 2021

What are all of these ancient backlog articles?

Veteran drive participants may notice that our backlog looks a little different this month. After a bit of discussion, we have added {{cleanup tense}} to the list of templates that mark articles as suitable for copy editing. Since that template had a backlog, we have temporarily extended the age of our backlog from three months to ten years. All of those old articles count as "old" articles for this drive and should be marked with *O in your lists. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:37, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for explaining; I did wonder where that lot came from. Cheers, Baffle☿gab 02:20, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So far, I have found it very satisfying to find a month with just one article in it and edit that article. I cleared a whole month of the backlog! – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:24, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And I'll try to keep up with the G6s

. All the best, Miniapolis 17:10, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have also enjoyed clearing up monthly backlogs! It occurred to me that this sort of exercise might be worth considering for the Blitzes. Years ago, we used to clean up articles in specific subject areas—I remember one was Cooking—although I have no idea how the lists were drawn up. Twofingered Typist (talk) 19:23, 4 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Those lists were compiled manually with Catscan (Petscan?), which I've never been able to work well

. Think Jonesey95 used to do it. All the best, Miniapolis 13:30, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I just wish most of them weren't so tedious to read through and edit. A lot need proper cleanup rather than a simple copy-edit as the tenses template implies. I've found poor sourcing, bugger-all sourcing and BLP text sourced to documents that should never be used in Wikipedia articles. I'm happy to deal with that stuff (remove, remove, remove!) but I can see why no-one else wants to deal with these backlogs. Cheers, Baffle☿gab 19:59, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Baffle gab here. I'm going through the List of fictional presidents of the United States series and think that these listicles would be better rewritten as prose than as bullet points (which goes beyond copyediting). Some of them don't appear to be notable, if their source material is anything to go by. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 20:33, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

My favorite so far was a biography of a TV soap opera character. I took the liberty of trimming a bit, but it was so preposterous to read all at once that it kept me amused. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:51, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

New contributors

Do we specifically welcome the new contributors after each drive? If not, maybe a special barnstar for joining the group? Lfstevens (talk) 07:54, 2 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I sometimes write a short custom note after awarding the barnstars. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:22, 2 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How to acknowledge collaboration?

I see that one of the articles I was working on (Dark Reign (comics)) has been completed overnight by someone else in the drive. What's the process for acknowledging partial work by another editor? I see that it's been done under one of Tenryuu's articles but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to put that there or the person who completed it is. Contrawwftw (talk) 20:46, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For the purposes of the drive word count, use a rough count of the words in the portion of the article that you copy-edited. You can copy/paste the text into a text editor or word processing program and do a word count there, if that helps. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:25, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, before I begin a copyedit I check the page history to see if another GOCE member may be working on it; to avoid situations like this, I remove the relevant tags before beginning a copyedit. All the best, Miniapolis 22:49, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly recommend doing what Miniapolis suggested, as removing the templates that our backlog catches (e.g., {{cleanup tense}} and {{copy edit}}) on articles will remove it from the backlog, so that other copy editors don't inadvertently click on it and start editing away. I'll deal with the conflict that I had near the end of the drive; for now, let's just keep clearing out those templates. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 23:00, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah ok. I did check that noone was working on it before I started. But removing the tags is a good idea Contrawwftw (talk) 23:00, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

ok added it to my section. thanks Contrawwftw (talk) 23:01, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]