Wikipedia talk:WikiProject recruitment for WikiProjects

Management department

I want to examine in what ways my ideas about the management department are similar, or dissimilar, possibly even collide with John's ideas behind a management department.

My ideas:

"The management department will have a top-down hierarchical structure. Managers will decide which WikiProjects have the best chances to succeed and will designate recruiters to tasks in order to make WikiProjects to a succes. A special recruitment department could be founded next to the management department, which will be subordinated under the management department. The management department could come to recruitment strategies and create texts that can be used as example for adressing people."

"WikiProject recruitment for WikiProjects is aimed at making WikiProjects succesful by creating an agency dedicated to starting WikiProjects with a healthy base of active participants, or to recruit new active participants for WikiProjects which have withered away in activity."

John's ideas:

"It may well be indicated that a specific unit of this project would be created to help the project determine exactly where it could most usefully and productively focus its efforts. This "management" section would of course be completely voluntary, and no decisions or recommendations it might make would be necessarily binding on the individual members personally. It's primary function would be to help assess which inactive projects and/or active projects are most likely to benefit from receiving the assistance of this project and/or most likely to be most likely to be of use to wikipedia as a whole. In the event a project is formally validly declared (by template, generally), "inactive", no such request would be necessary. If it is a newer active or recently created project, such assistance would only be furnished by request of at least one officially listed member/participant of the proposed "client" project."

--Daanschr 19:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

My only reason for changing the statements about any sort of authority really "deciding" anything is that such top-down management is almost always questioned, and generally found to contravene one or more official policy of wikipedia. Also, I wanted to make it clear that if, for instance, I as an individual said we should help a given project, but that the group itself chose to disagree with me, there would be no apparent rule which would seem to prevent me as an individual from perhaps doing some work there anyway. It would technically be impossible to prevent me or anyone else from acting independently anyway, and I thought that such might as well be indicated up front. Also, the idea of generally creating any form of formal hierarchy, which is required for a top-down management structure, presents lots of problems, particularly in matters such as consensus, and could possibly present a situation where someone might be giving virtual "orders" to someone else, which is really something that raises a lot of hackles around here. John Carter 19:38, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, perhaps a top-down structure isn't right. I am focused mostly on effectivity, so authority isn't a necessity. Effectivity is in my view. It can be effective not to have a hierarchical organization. What i do like is that participants will focus on certain tasks and that when somebody takes on a certain responsibility, by choosing for it voluntarily, that others can rely upon it that this responsibility is being met. So, it is voluntary, but also systematic and manageable. Would you agree with this so far?--Daanschr 20:04, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

That would be best. As long there are also no attempts to "discipline" individuals who for whatever reason don't act as they indicated as quickly as some of us might like (the real world happens), I don't see a problem. Also, lack of formal management doesn't prevent someone from being bold and maybe asking another party to assist in some activities a given party hasn't done as they indicated and/or doing some of it themselves. John Carter 20:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

It is better to reward than to punish.

Point is that management is something authoritarian. How can we decide what will be managed? Take the WikiProject proposals for instance. There are so many WikiProjects on the list that will not make it. Someone has an idea and posts it. Some others follow that idea and that's it. How can people be committed? The hierarchy is intended in choosing which projects will be followed with recruiters actively recruiting for a WikiProject and make it effectively a succes. So, authority is in the choice for the WikiProject not in ordering people around, but in excluding people. Something that happens automatically at the moment. The people who exclude within the recruitment project are including WikiProjects in order to making them a succes, thereby excluding those WikiProjects for which they lack time in making them a succes. It is order into chaos, but a specific order, which excludes much of the chaos. So, there is no punishment needed. Besides, punishment won't work very well in a volunteer project.--Daanschr 21:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

My concern with your text was not the absence of a hierarchy, but the focus on inactive WikiProjects. My view is to focus on succes, not lack of succes. To strengthen those parts which can be made succesful. To ensure that participants can start something enthusiastically instead of having to finish something of.--Daanschr 20:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I wasn't trying to "focus" on inactive projects, just deal reasonably with the topic, considering it will have to be dealt with. There have been quite a few good projects which have for whatever reason gone dormant, sometimes for a long period, if their most active editors leave. WP:KLF might become one such in the future, and might be a good example. That project was basically a "micro-project" of two people, one of whom I guess (?) has died and the other one, User:Kingboyk, recently went on an extended break. The project, despite its lack of lots of members, has been quite successful with the articles in its scope. It has also already been nominated for deletion once, when Kingboyk was focusing most of his efforts elsewhere, although that nomination was closed speedily. Situations like this are almost certain to happen in the future, whether they're as common as new projects or not. I just wanted to make some sort of guidelines for cases involving such projects when those situations do arise. John Carter 20:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't get how people sign up for the KLF, and I can't get any people to sign up for WP:Athens. So, basically we assist inactive/active Wikiprojects and those looking for support in getting started up? We lay the ground work and once we are done, we leave? _{El Greco}^(talk) 20:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

You sign up for the KLF project by adding your name to the participants section. I think that's pretty much it. Not that many people have ever done so, though, given it still only has five members.

Regarding the Athens project, part of the problem there might be that the potential members might not see that the project is required, given the other existing coverage of the greater subject area (Greece and ancient Greece), and/or there may not be that many people who honestly feel that they could contribute enough to the relevant articles to justify listing themselves as members. The fact that the existing WP:GREECE deals to a significant degree with articles relating to Athens is probably part of the problem. The other part is that I'm fairly sure the number of active editors in the English wikipedia who live in Athens is probably rather small. Note that most of the other cities projects which are successful are either in the English-speaking world, meaning that there probably will be quite a few native editors, and/or have had significant substantial history as differentiated entites, like Hong Kong, for instance, so that people will see them primarily as separate entites. Such a status generally gives with it more military history, governmental activity, diplomatic history, and so on, than a city which has always been seen as being part of a given country has.

Whether "we leave" after set-up, rejuvenation, or whatever, would of course be entirely each individual's own decision. Depending on the degree of work a given editor has done, they might not want to, perhaps thinking that they might be useful to the project based on their now possibly substantial knowledge of the relevant wikipedia articles. I don't want to say how many userboxes I've gotten because of this sort of thinking. But once the requested work is done, there probably wouldn't be a real need to be as actively involved in the "client" project, as we would hopefully choose projects which are going to be viable on their own. The group might, if there are enough assessors, maybe help the project in periodic assessment or development or creation of portals or whatever, but I don't think that we should think that the members of this group would necessarily be significantly actively involved in creating or improving articles relevant to the subject once the "set-up" or rejuvenation is finished. John Carter 20:49, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

That's first sentence was suppose to be a joke/rhetorical statement. But thanks for the advice nonetheless. _{El Greco}^(talk) 21:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we lay the groundwork. This project is about looking for the people who want to lay the groundwork and continue their WikiProject without us eventually.

We don't need to find all participants within Wikipedia. We can look all over the world. A WikiProject Athens can be advertised in Greek forums for instance. With recruitment, i mean worldwide recruitment in every corner as far and detailed as we can get. And we can recruit recruiters, thereby creating chains of recruitment all focused on achieving certain goals.--Daanschr 21:13, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

True. So what you seem to be thinking about sounds like maybe a group which would both advertise the existence of a project in a foreign language wiki as well as within the English. Probably a very good idea, if we have people who can actually write reasonably well in those languages to create the announcements. I guess what I was thinking was that, at least in the English language wiki, the presence of the project banner on the talk page is still probably the most effective way of letting editors know the project is there. We would clearly list projects on the Community Portal, on the Directory, and try to include them in any relevant templates listing related WikiProjects. We could also check for which users use relevant userboxes and or have been significantly involved in editing major related pages and inform them of the project as well. But in general, personally, I think the two most effective adverts out there are the project banner and the project page itself. If the project page or banner is, well, ugly, no one's going to be thinking of joining when they see it, which would be very counterproductive. So I was thinking that at least helping make sure they were as appealing as reasonably possible would be a priority. And, considering many of these project proposers won't know a lot of the intracacies involved in, for instance, setting up a project for assessment, we could probably do that as the same time as setting up the project banner. The same would likely apply to setting up a project page. I honestly hadn't thought about the possibility of trying to "advertise" in foreign language wikis, and so haven't entirely thought through how to do that. We would need people at least minimally proficient in all the relevant languages, and that might be a problem, specifically regarding some languages. Beyond that, though, I don't think the details would be very hard to work out. John Carter 21:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I was not thinking about foreign language wikis, but anywhere on the internet and common daily life.--Daanschr 21:50, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Management and authority

(Same text as above, but trying to structurize the discussion)

Point is that management is something authoritarian. How can we decide what will be managed? Take the WikiProject proposals for instance. There are so many WikiProjects on the list that will not make it. Someone has an idea and posts it. Some others follow that idea and that's it. How can people be committed?

The hierarchy is intended in choosing which projects will be followed with recruiters actively recruiting for a WikiProject and make it effectively a succes. So, authority is in the choice for the WikiProject not in ordering people around, but in excluding people and their WikiProjects. Something that happens automatically at the moment, because Wikipedia is sometimes a barren desert where nobody hears your call, unless you go out and meet people yourself. The people who exclude within the recruitment project are including WikiProjects in order to making them a succes, thereby excluding those WikiProjects for which they lack time in making them a succes. It is order into chaos, but a specific order, which excludes much of the chaos. So, there is no punishment needed. Besides, punishment won't work very well in a volunteer project.--Daanschr 21:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Competition can be a solution to the problem of the authoritarian choice for a WikiProject. If several WikiProjects are chosen at the same time, than managers have to make an effort in convincing recruiters which WikiProjects are the most worthwhile to recruit for. Recruiters can get popular among managers for their succes in recruiting, thereby the whole authority problem can be averted. (Can't imagine clearly how it will work in practise, though)--Daanschr 21:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Next step

I have the impression that the discussion about the management department has dried up a little. The discussion was too abstract, i think. Management is an activity. Therefore i propose to choose a WikiProject and start recruiting as a testcase. The methodology of the management department can evolve during the recruitment. So, which WikiProject will we recruit for? It must be something for which people could be interested in, so it shouldn't be too obscure or boring.--Daanschr 09:38, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

A good way to come to a decision for the moment, to get things started is to ask everyone applying to start a WikiProject, to help recruiting for other WikiProjects in order to collectively making the recruiting project a success?--Daanschr 18:14, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I will recruit some more people tomorrow in order to get more life into this project. My work consists out of doing nearly nothing and getting paid for it, which is pretty boring. So, i will spend a lot of time recruiting! I am managing a computerroom at a school for 16 to 20 years old.--Daanschr 16:01, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I can see how that would be less than thrilling. Regarding getting new project starters to start recruiting for other projects, that could be problematic, particularly if the project proposer should have little if any interest or ability beyond their own limited scope. But, just as a suggestion, Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink has only eight members for a project of really tremendous scope and importance. That might be one place to start. John Carter 16:23, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I see dozens of participants on that WikiProject, though the majority could be inactive. There are several subgroups.--Daanschr 09:22, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Okay, we will take WikiProject Food and drink as a testcase. It is not good just to start recruiting, first we need to orientate. I will examine this project and talk with the main contributors. Ask them what they want. It would be helpful to think about what can get the interest of the wider public, so they would be interested to join this project.--Daanschr 18:24, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I will start up a new article for the management department tomorrow, where recruiting strategies can be build up. My suggestions for managing recruitment for WikiProject Food and drink is that we start with an orientation phase in which the goals of the recruitment will be determined, followed by a recruitment phase and finished by a evaluation phase after which a new recruitingproject can be started. My father is a director of a company, he plans everything in in time schedules via excell sheets, that could be an idea.--Daanschr 20:01, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Moving to subpage of WikiProject Council

I think this project would be better served as a working group of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council (assuming this project/work group ever becomes active). Right now this would include moving to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Recruitment work group, or something to that effect. I'm not really planning on trying to revive this project or otherwise work on it at this time, but as far as structure and general cleanup of inactive projects this would probably be better as a subpage of this project. -Optigan13 (talk) 01:40, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure there's any need to retain the existing material, actually, since it's not really developed (and pretty much duplicates the purpose of the Council itself). Could we just redirect this page to the main WP:COUNCIL one instead? Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 02:29, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I'll still leave this up for the standard xFD 7 days to make sure. -Optigan13 (talk) 02:33, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Works for me; maybe someone else will suggest a better idea. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 02:39, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

I started the project and it may be deleted. If the WikiProject Council has a similar mission, than there is no need to keep a project without any activity.Daanschr (talk) 10:21, 28 August 2009 (UTC)