Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-07-15/Op-ed/Earlier

Comments on Rocco Edit-A-Thon

@22mikpau: - Thank you for taking the initiative in your new role as News Manager! This is a big undertaking. I have two main contributions to your article. First, here's a mini-bio about WP:RRTF. The information is mostly garnered from the forum archives, as I haven't been around very long. Please don't use it verbatim - rephrase it!

• WP:RRTF, or as it was then known, "The Percy Jackson and the Olympians Task Force", was created in March 2009. Notable members involved with its creation include Next-Genn-Gamer and Pmlineditor, with Mktsay123 one of the more active early members. I don't know whose idea it was originally, but the first two were definitely involved. The first two were also members of WP:NV before starting the project and seem to have felt there was a shortage of editing interest for PJ books (the sentiment was not shared by WP Novels, but they didn't interfere with the fledgling task force). After shortening its name to "Percy Jackson Task Force", the project remained active until mid-2011. At this point, most members had become inactive even in the overall encyclopedia.

Editing peaked in 2010. The project decided that they would cover The Heroes of Olympus, but not The Kane Chronicles. Talk page posts seem to indicate that while the project had a max of 32 members, few were active. Many edits were what we'd call "fan edits" today - lots of page creations with no content, unencyclopedic content, a new page for every character, etc. This is not to say that they got nothing done - several pages got promoted to GA status, a book was created. In order to solve the problem, they instituted a "roll-call" procedure in May 2010. After this, we have a clearer picture of who was involved. In October of 2010, they considered their first "rebrand" to increase their scope size, but the motion failed to pass.

I came in during July of 2015, when the project was listed as "inactive". At that time I was its sole active member, although several others were listed. A few more members joined up and were fairly active. I started a push to rebrand and cover all of Riordan's books in October 2015. The rebrand was completed December 2015, leaving us named "The Rick Riordan Task Force" and covering all of Riordan's mythology books and Tres Navarre, but not anything covered by WP:39. We held our first new roll-call in August-September 2016. At that point we had 11 active members. Currently, we have 16 (although I suspect several will drop during our roll-call this year). Along the way, we added in media by John Rocco, Riordan's longtime illustrator, just to make the scope broader.

I had the idea for the Edit-A-Thon when I was making up the "current focus" calendar for this year. I usually do a scan for pages or areas in need of our help, and these make up the backbone of the calendar. Rocco's books were scheduled for later in the calendar, but I noticed that Rocco's birthday is approaching and decided to move it up and turn it into a Collaboration as a test of how quickly the task force could mobilize. The verdict? Not very fast.

That's the history. It's not particularly glamorous; you can choose to portray it in a more positive light if you wish. As for my other comments:

• Mostly, you need to correct your factual inaccuracies. The task force did, in fact, die. We have not made very much progress (although we cover close to 50 pages, nearly half are start or stub class). You are right, however, that we struggle with maintaining active members, and that the Edit-A-Thon was in part a way to fix that. And it's also worth noting that, while we share the same pages and responsibilities as the Percy Jackson task force, our current membership, organization, and scope mean RRTF is a distinct project from PJTF. They were our inspiration, our parents, but that's it.
• I think you also need to change the style of your writing. It needs to be longer, or you need to stop changing topics so rapidly (for instance, your "However" sentence cuts off the idea from your "For example" sentence abruptly, and completely reverses the tone and direction). You also need to pick a tense - you switch back and forth between present and past.
• Finally, I would prefer if you didn't mention me in the article, except as a contact. I am not looking to draw attention to myself; rather, I would like to draw attention to the project. It has been my experience that naming myself as WP:NV coordinator seems to place the focus on me as some kind of leader, which is not true. I just volunteered to be the liaison to our parent project, much like a PR Rep. It's appropriate to just use "we" here. There are only 16 members - when the project publishes something saying "we did x" or "the project thinks y", chances are it's just one person speaking. You should double check with any users you mention that it's ok to use their info, or you run the risk of putting words in their mouth and misrepresenting their ideas. Here, I don't want to come off as the project's leader because it hurts other people's feelings and shifts accountability away from the individual members. We need to maintain a positive, hardworking atmosphere in the task force in order to stay active.

That's all I have to say here. I figured it was best to put these comments here rather than on the forums, as some are more personally directed towards you. Let me know if I can be of any more assistance. -- 2ReinreB2 (talk) 22:22, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, I fixed the easiest stuff already and I'm working on the style changes. As for the length I will increase it but not dramatically since the Signpost staff wants it to be an opinion article about how task forces are struggling with staying active because (as seen with the 39 clues task force) we're not the only ones with the problem. RRTF will likely be the "prime" example but other editors will give their 2 cents so that readers will get a range of views or realise how big the problem is. I don't think this will damage our case of spreading awareness about the force. Thanks again for the feedback, it really helps. P.S, sorry I havn' t been active on task force pages, this really sucks up time. 22mikpau (talk) 12:53, 24 June 2017 (UTC)

• I'm close to finishing 1700+ articles for the Queensland Heritage Register project. What I've learned from this is that if you want to tackle big projects, regardless of the interest expressed in being involved, the bulk of the work will fall to a very small number of people. Most Wikipedians just want to fiddle with small things without commitment to any greater goal, not too many want to do the heavy lifting of extensive content writing, tedious maintenance work like fixing deadlink citations, etc. FWIW, I think it's not a good idea to create separate wiki pages for taskforces/subprojects until there is a substantial number of genuinely active contributors. If the number of active contributors is small, I'd say keep your conversations on the Talk page of a larger more active WikiProject (obviously one that is relevant) so people keep seeing the activity and possibly join in. If the conversations are taking place between a couple of folks in a subproject, nobody else is going to see it. I'd stay on the major project page until they kick you out. And in any case, issues that arise in one taskforce/subproject often do have parallels in others, so it makes sense to find common approaches to similar issues rather than each small group having a highly idiosyncratic way to do similar things (which makes it harder to integrate new people compared with a more widespread approach). While past perforance is no guarantee of future performace (as they say in the financial advertisements), look at the people you have expressing interest and see what their performance actually looks like using tools like Edit Counter. How many edits are they typically doing each month, how many articles are they creating each month, (for projects that need images) how much are they uploading to Commons etc? You will pretty quickly get a sense of what their productivity is like and how much genuine "horsepower" you might get at best (obviously people will still do other editing work). Set your taskforce goals *very* modest to start with. If the task looks too big, your participants will lose motivation. Better to get some quick wins with small goals before tackling bigger goals. Obviously goals will vary from one group to another. Some are looking for higher quality, others aiming for broader coverage, etc. Kerry (talk) 05:11, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

• Just a quick note on task forces over at WikiProject Military history, and also a special project of WikiProject Yugoslavia. Milhist has a lot of task forces, which are really just ways of sorting the work of the project, in that we tag articles by task force as they are created. They are sorted by general topics like fortifications, or military aviation, by nation or region, or by period or conflict. Very few of the actual task forces have a significant number of active members or have a lot of activity "in" the task force per se, although some do, usually narrowly focussed ones that intersect two or more task forces like Maritime and WWI. In some ways, task forces just organise the work editors are doing anyway in their areas of interest, and don't really direct the work, per se. It is more like they record the work being done and what has been achieved. We have also had special projects focussed on areas that fall into one or more task force areas, like Operation Brothers at War (the American Civil War), Operation Great War Centennial (World War I), and Operation Majestic Titan (battleships and battlecruisers), but other than the latter, none have had particular longevity or great success, although they are there to help direct work if editors appear that want to work in them. Even Operation Majestic Titan has seen better days and relies on a handful of editors to keep it going. At WikiProject Yugoslavia there is a special project called Operation Bora which is really a WikiProject Military history and WikiProject Yugoslavia hybrid focussed on Yugoslavia in World War II. It continues to tick along, but that is also really down to a handful of editors. My overall view on task forces (and special projects) is that you need a small core of committed members, a narrow focus, and achievable goals in the short term. You also need a wider group of editors willing to review the work at GAN and FA, something that WikiProject Military history excels at. WikiProject Military history has also really benefited from having formal assessment tiers like B-Class and A-Class, as well as a system of awards and recognition. These things help focus Military history members to support their fellow members by reviewing their work. I think task forces and special projects have a future on WP, but only if they have a narrow focus and modest initial goals. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 02:28, 26 June 2017 (UTC)