Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/WikiProject report

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Questions answered by --Snek01 (talk) 15:14, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Question: "The project is home to one A-class article (Chittenango ovate amber snail) and six good articles ranging from Byne's disease to love darts. Were you involved with any of these articles and which article are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?"

That is not important if I am proud of these articles or not. I am not proud of them. Writing them was very easy. But I am proud of wikipedians like User:Antarctic-adventurer and User:Anna Frodesiak, that are writing valuable articles although they are not biologists. Featured articles are viewed about 13× times more often than DYK hook gastropod-related articles. But writing DYK hook articles is even much more easier (and more effective) than writing featured article and more articles provide more general point of view. It would be fine if they could reach featured article status, but it will not improve their quality. Standards for featured gastropod-related articles are much higher than for example for birds, for example no bird-related featured articles contains anatomy of the animal although detailed anatomy section is demanded for gastropods. Writing featured articles or trying to get articles to featured articles status is not my priority. I can easily tag my article with A-class article status without peer review as I did with Chittenango ovate amber snail and nobody cares.

Question: "There are no unassessed articles within your project. How did you accomplish this and do you have any advice to other projects with large backlogs of unassessed articles?"

That did User:Invertzoo and User:Daniel Cavallari. This as an example of bad organizing of the project, such wasting of human power is very non-effective. That work could be done with a Bot. My advice is: tag unassessed articles by a bot as stub article with a low priority.

Question: "The articles on snails, pearls, and Gastropoda each receive over 2,000 views daily, however two of the three articles are only at C-class status. What are some of the biggest challenges to improving popular articles like these?"

C-status for popular gastropod related articles is absolutely enough. Gastropods are out of scope of public, of scientists and out of scope of the whole human society. All informations about gastropods are usually very unbalanced and thus the project should belong to Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias.

Question: "What can the average editor contribute to gastropod articles?"

This is the most important question.
Go to the library or send an email to the right person and verify copyright status of malacological works published in the USA in 1923-1977. Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods/Texts#1923 - 1977 from USA without a copyright notice and later section. There are only two articles (written by me last week) that uses public domain text from the USA from that era. I believe that no other articles on the whole Wikipedia(!) uses public domain texts from USA from that time athough over 95% of books are PUBLIC DOMAIN. This is very interesting in comparison with about 5000 commons:Template:PD-US-no notice images about 5000 commons:Template:PD-US-not renewed images on commons. "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" should also support using free texts. Maybe it is a phrase for other projects, but for gastropods using such texts is the only way how to reach the full scope. Do you live in a city with English library or are you diplomatic enough? So do this task and you will be much more useful for the project than you think. (Links: malacologist, Category:American malacologists.)
- Example: Go to the library and (carefully) check if there is copyright notice it this book: Pilsbry H. A. (1948). Land Mollusca of North America north of Mexico vol. II part 2. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia. pp. 521-1113. [1]. - Do this for every valuable book and let us to know on the project page. Every result (negative or positive) is useful. Thank you.

Then you can add these public domain or Creative Commons texts and images from these sources. Me or wikiproject members will help you how to start. 20% of non-stub gastropod related articles contains incorporated some free text. This means that every fifth gastropod related article has text copied from some book or journal. This is the (maybe) highest amount of using such texts on wikipedia. But it is necessary, because nobody of us and of you can write it better than experts who wrote those books. I believe that ammount should get even higher in the future.
I am (probably) the most active member of the wikiproject gastropods but I can contibute only at intermediate level of English and I there are (nearly) no English malacological books in libraries in the country where I live. So if I can write gastropod articles, than EVERYBODY OF YOU can write gastropod related articles also. The only need is your motivation. Your motivation can range from "I like gastropods" or "I want to be useful to Wikipedia" (there is not enough project members) to your intention, that you want to learn something new. I can guarantee for you, that you will certainly learn new things.
You can translate from original German, French and Japan huge number of public domain sources. But I am not sure if there is enough useful sources on other wikipedias.
There appeared no gastropod related featured image on the Main page since 2008... - and many more tasks...

Question: "Anything else you'd like to add?"

When evaluating the project, there is necessary to evaluate also its effectivity. For example the WikiProject Gastropods is approximatelly (now) as big as for example WikiProject Mammals and WikiProject Birds altogether in its number of articles, but even bigger in its scope = in number of species, but number of its members is 9× (for all 20 listed Wikiproject gastropods members) or 17× (for about by guess 10 active members) lower for Wikiproject gastropods. So I think, that WikiProject Gastropods belongs to the most effective Wikiprojects. This is because effectivity has the highest priority in the project.