Template talk:WikiProject Essays

Forget the assessment

and take it away. Not use for WPESSAYS. Kayau Voting IS evil 03:54, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Essay_Categorization_and/or_Classification#Proposal_for_Importance_Grading would be a good place for you to present your views and see where consensus is on this. A discussion was initiated, but had limited participation. ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 19:50, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

As an update, the discussion has commenced and consensus is to continue. The scale has been renamed "Impact" instead of "Importance" and is a descriptive measure of an essay's impact, as measured by pageviews, watchers, and incoming links. This information is aggregated for all essays in a table, and a bot auto-assigns Top- High- Mid- and Low-impact based on that table. ɳorɑfʈ ^Talk! 12:50, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Doesn't work

This template should categorise essays into Category:Wikipedia essays by impact, but the subcategories are empty. It looks like this edit by MSGJ removed the functionality? 101.174.65.247 (talk) 09:12, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Not guilty! That was the edit by Good Olfactory in 2015 with the edit summary "category was deleted". I'm sure which category was deleted though. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:45, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

See here. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 00:16, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Okay so the decision was to remove Template-impact but that edit seems to have removed all the categories. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:00, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Getting the assessment online again

We've recently revived the list of essays sorted by their impact score (kudos to AntiCompositeNumber and the other bot folks), but it looks like the new scores aren't yet resulting in any changes or new assignments to the categories essays are in, so the essay talk pages aren't reflecting the work. It looks like the way that was done was related to code at this template. Do you know how to get this functionality working again? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:58, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Courtesy pinging Good Olfactory and MSGJ from above. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:02, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Based on Special:Diff/353350653, it looks like that was performed by another bot task. In any case, all the impact ratings are hard-coded in the template invocations on each page now. If we were to (re)implement automatic impact adjustments, it would be fairly simple to do with a centralized data page. The data page would have a {{#switch}} mapping {{SUBJECTPAGENAME}} to the rankings as appropriate, and could be updated by the bot. This template would then use that value as the default impact assessment but could replace it with a value from a parameter. If that's done, the existing impact assessments should be removed if they are incorrect or redundant. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:20, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

So basically there are two parallel systems running now? Xenobot Mk V added the impact ratings to each template and your bot is maintaining that central list? I guess it would be good if they worked together, but it seems simpler, more transparent (and avoids a huge switch) to have the impact ratings for each template stored locally. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:27, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber and MSGJ: this is way over my head haha, but whatever works sounds good to me. JSYK, the ultimate end goal I have in mind is to revive my initial proposal here to feature the impact rating on essay pages themselves, not just essay talk pages, since I think they're useful information for essay readers. For essays that already have an impact rating on their talk page, I managed to get an extremely finicky version of my idea working at Template:Essay/sandbox using {{Template parameter value}}. You can glimpse how it might look in action if you preview a page like WP:FENCE or WP:NBRD after replacing {{essay|WP:FENCE}} with {{essay/sandbox|WP:FENCE}}. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:42, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Would it be helpful to file another BOTREQ for this? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 09:31, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, Good Olfactory, and MSGJ: AntiCompositeBot is now outputting template-readable data to User:AntiCompositeBot/EssayImpact/data when it runs. It only contains the rank and score right now, but I can add other data if necessary. I've created Template:WikiProject Essays/impactscale, which turns the table rank into a score according to Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia essays/Assessment#Impact_scale, as well as a prototype talk page template at Template:WikiProject Essays/sandbox. The prototype completely ignores the existing impact rating, which may not be ideal. I'll leave it up to you all how you want to handle the existing ratings though. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:09, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: Awesome! My understanding from Template:WikiProject_Essays#Quality_scale is that the impact rating is always supposed to be algorithmically generated (it's not fair to try to judge the "quality" of an essay), so I'd assume that 99% of the existing ratings are the leftovers from the previous bot, and of the remaining 1%, most are probably erroneous or inferior to what the bot would produce. So I'd say go ahead and override them all. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:39, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Seeing no further comments, I'm going ahead and implementing the sandbox version. I tweaked the wording for the bot line a bit for usability; I wish it didn't have to be its own line, but it looks like {{WPBannerMeta}} can't easily handle anything else. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:31, 25 May 2020 (UTC)

Adding missing instances of this tag

I've noticed a bunch of pages that use {{Essay}} on their page but don't have this template on their talk page. @AntiCompositeNumber:, could we run a program that adds this to all the places where it's missing? I'm not sure how to set that up. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 09:46, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=16313782 is the full list. I feel that this is something that is context-dependent, and would be best done with AWB or another semi-auto tool. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:37, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Following up on this, I ran a search using {{Essay}} instead of Category:Wikipedia essays and got 2500 results instead of 3800 (the discrepancy is most likely that my search didn't include variations on {{Essay}}). There does seem to be some amount of miscategorization (i.e. people calling things essays that should really be how-to pages or information pages or the like), but on the whole, 2500 is still a big number, so it seems there's a bunch of cleanup to do for anyone inclined to tidy up. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:00, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

@AntiCompositeNumber: I'm finally getting around to this, but I'm having trouble replicating the PetScan list in AWB. Is there any way to import a PetScan list to AWB? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:26, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Dunno, never used it. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 23:04, 13 September 2020 (UTC)