Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Archive 19

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Possible expansion of core biographies list

I have suggested that maybe there be a few articles added to the list of core biographies at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Core biographies#Proposed expansion of list. I think that the articles included in the list there might also be at least somewhat relevant to this group as well, and any input would be more than appreciated. John Carter (talk) 01:05, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Major Depressive Disorder (Vincent van Gogh: "At Eternity's Gate")

I refer the group to this thread on the Talk page at Major Depressive Disorder concerning the use of Vincent van Gogh's painting "At Eternity's Gate" in that article and to this comment of mine pointing out it has no place in the article and should be removed.

The essence of the complaint is that is fully documented that van Gogh's painting is not at all, nor was ever meant to be, a portrayal of depressive disorder but is rather merely a study of an old man. For that reason alone it should be removed for reasons of encyclopaedic accuracy.

As it stands it necessarily makes a judgement about the nature of depressive disorder, that it necessarily implies despair, even that it necessarily implies suicidal ideation (because of its title and van Gogh's own well known suicide). It is very much to be regretted indeed in my opinion that a Wikipedia administrator, Casliber, a practicising psychiatrist it seems but a poor historian of art, appears to be the prime mover behind perpetuating these poor judgements.

It also mythologises Vincent van Gogh himself who took the greatest care to separate his difficulties in life from his work; the nature of whose illness is not settled but which is not certainly typical of a depressive disorder; who is not documented as suffering from suicidal depressive moods in the last months of his life when this painting was completed and whose suicide itself has in the past year been plausibly questioned by a respected source as rather a manslaughter.

I ask that the image be removed. If it is felt necessary, and I cannot imagine why it should be, that the article be illustrated by a fine art image, then I suggest the original image, Durer's Melancholia, be reinserted. Skirtopodes (talk) 22:33, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

This page is not an appropriate venue for your concerns. You should begin by discussing the matter on the talk page of the article itself. The people who watch this page have no special authority to assist with images in articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:38, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Tchaikovsky Featured Article Review proposal

See here - comments welcome.--Smerus (talk) 21:41, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Rankings of areas of knowledge in Wikipedia

How do the various areas of knowledge rank—(1) in quality of information, and (2) in quantity of information—in Wikipedia articles? I am seeking more-precise information than what is provided at Wikipedia:Systemic bias. This two-part question can be answered according to any (one or more) of these classifications.

—Wavelength (talk) 21:26, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

We don't have information on such things available right now, but we do have tons of metadata (quality and importance information) that could be used to put together that information. If you have a PhD candidate available, you could do an amazing job and get a really interesting & comprehensive set of results. Assuming you want something sooner than that, with much less work, we could talk further about ways to analyze the data and try to get a rough idea. I would say (a) you can't really use number of articles alone to determine how well a topic is represented, and (b) what is a "balanced" selection depends on your culture and background. (As a chemist myself, I'd choose to have 50% of Wikipedia be on chemistry topics.....!) Walkerma (talk) 18:22, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Bot problems?

Don't know where to discuss the bot, but can someone look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Nevada/Assessment#Assessment_log this page in particular the reassessed on Feb 20. Then look for those two entries back in the history. Seems like a time warp. Thanks. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:47, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

Will the Offline Naming Conventions be Better?

If someone searches for the big bang theory in the offline version, will he/she end up looking at an article about an american sitcom or, what is really the big bang theory???70.27.8.199 (talk) 04:12, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

The offline versions use redirects and (sometimes) disambiguation pages too, so it should be similar to the online version in that regard. If there's a problem with that particular page in the online version, that should be fixed first and the offline version will then work the same way. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 16:33, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
The unregistered editor is just forum-shopping. This is at least the fourth page I've seen his complaint on. It's too bad that he doesn't know WP:How to lose and/or have anything better to do with his time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Preparing for Version 0.9

Things have been pretty quiet here for a while, and I've personally been busy elsewhere, but another offline general collection is now long overdue. We have come a long way, but IMHO we still have some things to do before we release Version 1.0 - that's why I'm proposing that the next release be Version 0.9.

What we now have

  • A great community of editors and WikiProjects willing to help in guiding our work.
  • A comprehensive quality assessment scheme - though it's not perfect, it gives us a very good sense of which articles are good enough to include in a collection.
  • A scheme for judging the importance of a topic from four different measures - also helps us picking the articles that are essential to include.
  • A way to choose the best RevisionID (article version), using WikiTrust, so as to avoid vandalism and dubious edits.
  • A method for compiling a collection using the above information, and converting it into a ZIM file ready for offline use.
  • Offline reader software, such as Kiwix and Okawix.

What we still need

  • A way to organize and index the articles reliably - to provide an alternative to searching as a way to browse the collection. Categories help, but categories alone don't do what we need.
  • Software to allow this whole process -to be carried out much more easily. There was some work in summer 2011, but it was not completed.
  • A simple way to update a collection after it has been released.

How you can help

Over the spring & summer we will need people helping with the following:

  1. Review manual article nominations
  2. Clean up important-but-poor articles
  3. Communicating with WikiProjects
  4. Developing a system for generating an index

The first three tasks are fairly light - a couple of hours a week would be enough for most, unless you want to get deep into article improvement. Developing an indexing system is likely to be much more work, but I (Walkerma) will be heavily involved in that too.

Discussion

Of these things we still need, I believe that the only essential one remaining for Version 1.0 is the index. Once we have the index, we have all of the tools and processes we need to put together a good collection of articles. As for the tools to make the process smoother, and to update the collections easily, I believe these may take a while, and should be the main focus of development for Version 2.0.

So, before we plunge into another release, I'd like to ask for people's opinions on our direction, and to hear your ideas for improving our next offline releases. I will be contacting all of our participants list to find who still wants to be involved. Please add your ideas and comments below. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 02:31, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

I think, it is important to determine the approximate number of article that 0.9 will include. I think it is unreasonable to go beyond 50,000—in my opinion, 0.9 should should focus on the quality of the selection, not quantity. Ruslik_Zero 18:26, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

In terms of prompting article improvement, can we get (easy, quick, 100% automated) lists of "likely to be selected" articles off to WikiProjects, perhaps monthly during the next six months? Ideally, this would be a focused list of low-quality/high-priority articles that need improvement, but anything would do. As a simple start, even a reminder to WikiProjects that we'll be using their ratings, so would they please make some effort to see that the ratings are up to date, might be useful for us. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:33, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
FWIW, I'm trying to go through the major Religion related reference books and using them as an indicator as to which articles are most important in the religion field. I hope to go on to philosophy and mythology thereafter, but it might take until the end of next month or so to do all of them. John Carter (talk) 21:46, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing - your suggestion is a very good one. What I may do is take a look at the lowest-quality articles that were found for the 0.8 selection, and contact the relevant WikiProjects ahead of time. If there is anyone who can help with writing a bot to post messages, I'd appreciate the help, because a bot posting might allow me to send article flags to perhaps 200 WikiProjects instead of just a few dozen I could do manually. That will hopefully get the word out that we're looking again at assessments, prior to us sending out the official announcement.
John, thanks as always for your tireless efforts in the religion articles! this list might be a good comparison (though that includes some quality scoring, too) - if our importance rankings are way off please let us know! If there are any obvious bad-but-important articles it would be good to flag these now so they can be fixed in time. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 19:23, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
There are actually going to be quite a few articles which are bad but important, I'm afraid. There are even quite a few important articles which don't yet exist, like Christianity in North America, Christianity in Latin America, and I don't know how many others. I am basically using the rather huge Mircea Eliade/Lindsay Jones Encyclopedia of Religion as the basis for Top importance classification for religion, and some might reasonably say that is a very broad selection, but for NPOV and countering systemic bias purposes I think it is a good start. I can try to at least address the concerns with some of the articles based on that work, but there is a great deal yet to be done. So far I've only gotten to Judaism in the list at User:John Carter/Religion articles#Encyclopedia of Religion by Lindsay Jones, but there is clearly a lot yet to be done. John Carter (talk) 18:38, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Maybe one of the "newsletter" bots could do that. Some are listed here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

If anyone will be at Wikimania, we can discuss the above in person. Please let us know, Walkerma (talk) 23:34, 28 June 2012 (UTC) It was good to meet some of you in person at Wikimania. It looks like we will be able to make a start on 0.9 soon. Walkerma (talk) 04:15, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, let's start things going! I'll be contacting various people. If you can help, please let us know.

Mobile version

Don't know if this is the correct forum but there seems to be much discussion of CD/DVD, a 20th century legacy technology, and none of having Wikipedia on your E-reader (no Internet) when you want a more thorough understanding of a matter mentioned in the E-book you're reading at the beach house in the Seychelles or mud hut in eastern Bolivia or whatever. The idea seems so obvious, I wonder whether the inadequacy of my searching skills is what's keeping me from finding the discussion. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:41, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

Jim - great comment! We have indeed moved on from CD/DVD, though these were the main media when we started the project in 2005, hence we have a lot of old pages referring to that technology. DVD is still a useful and very cheap way to do mass distribution of offline releases - it's widely used in India, for example, for distribution to schools - so we try to make collections that will fit onto a DVD in many cases. USB flash drive are also popular. But we're certainly looking at platforms like mobile phones and E-readers for upcoming releases, and these may even become the dominant platforms. There are people working on mobile phone versions, but we don't have anyone working on an Android version for the Nook, etc. I personally don't have the technical expertise. Would you be willing to head up a project to work on E-reader releases? Walkerma (talk) 17:48, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Little me? Wow; that's a lot of flattery. At most, I am qualified to carp and complain about how everyone else ought to be smarter. I merely noticed that E-readers and especially E-ink provide splendid portability for large volumes of text and not pictures, and that's what Wikipedia mostly is. All the words could fit on a single micro SD card (though such cards mostly fit smartphones and tablets, not E-readers) with maybe room for thumbnail pictures.

As a recently hatched photographer I'd like to see more pictures, but with today's book-sized devices they suffer under limitations of both storage and display (no color; not even gray). Thus, a Wikipedia with all articles and a full picture collection is suitable for today's unhandy, full size, full color, full service laptops. Well, not a full version of every picture in Commons but a restricted resolution version of those used in the encyclopedia. Hmm; this is rather a digression but I'll leave it in.

Anyway, now I know. Nobody is yet working on an edition of Wikipedia to go on a Sony Reader or Kindle Touch or other E-ink pocket device whose battery provides a week or three of reading rather than a day. Or even for the more expensive, more powerful and less handy Motorola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab. However, someone's got it in mind, and maybe someone who understands how to make such things happen will work on it. Jim.henderson (talk) 11:59, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

It sounds as if you know much more about this than me! No one else has volunteered to work on this, and so it simply won't happen for now, unless someone from the commercial sector sees money to be made from it. But if we can find someone else to lead an e-reader project, would you be willing to help out at least?
The focus for our little group has been on getting a file format (ZIM) that's suitable for a variety of uses, particularly with mobiles in mind. You might be interested to hear about the new Wikipedia Zero initiative by the Foundation, which is certainly a good project. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 16:25, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
The Grand Prix Wikipedia Brazil has another distribution model. They are putting together a version of the Portugese WP which the biggest seller of PCs in Brazil will load on every PC they sell. We can do that.
If we have a en:WP 0.9 up and running on most OSs then work on the other remaining OSs can follow later. It's a software project, creating new file readers, independent of the en:WP 0.9 project to create the data file for all these readers to use. Even indexing can start with an index of article names (including redirects). Then you can find what you need via our extensive page linking. Better indexing can be a software project for a different team that follows later and can be rolled out as a software update. filceolaire (talk) 20:42, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
All Wikipedia in one file? I guess so, knowing nothing about file formats. I only know my greed. The Wikiactivity that takes my biggest chunk of time is Wikipedia:Photograph your hometown. I bicycle around town with my little GPS smartphone, following Google Maps wherever it shows a [W] representing an article with coordinates. Tapping the W shows the lead of the article. Another link brings up the whole article in Mobile View, with a picture if the article has any. If no picture or only a poor one, I point my GPS camera, snap it, and pedal to the next W. At home, select, retouch, refine locations, upload pictures, and insert into articles.
Loading each article as needed through my cheap Virgin Mobile service slows the field work. Were Wikipedia already in my phone and Google Maps used that, it would save time. But only if it were somewhat up to date. Which means, I suppose, even if the encyclopedia originally got loaded into the phone on a micro SD card or other quick, massive offline method, it must be updated. Something like, it keeps track of which articles I've looked at and, when the connection is good, checks for later versions and downloads them to replace the old version.
Obviously only a relatively few outdoor readers care as much about Wikipictures as I do, and only a few are finding Wikipedia articles through GPS, but a great many are carring smartphones and E-readers and I hope whatever is done to reach them will also help me. And this is enough wishing; now I'm going to retouch, geotag and upload some more pictures. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:53, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining how you would use the offline version. I think we will get there eventually, but an updatable mobile version won't happen in the the next few months, I'm afraid! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:29, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Assessments

FYI, Template:Controversial-Class , Template:D-Class , Category:D-Class articles have been deleted. 70.24.251.208 (talk) 05:47, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

Pitch for Signpost proposal

I personally get a feeling that some of the "major" content gets neglected in a way, including a lot of the 1.0 material. Getting a bit more attention to the efforts here, and maybe in some of the WikiProjects which deal with content regarding the major topics, might help, maybe. I have made a proposal for maybe getting some possible regular coverage in the Signpost regarding what might be thought of as the major topical areas at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom#Proposals. One of the editors there responded that some sort of proposal might work, and seemed to agree that maybe it could fly if people would prepare the material. Would anyone here to maybe has helped work on some of the major topical areas be willing to maybe help with a few trial pieces for the Signpost, to see if it might be useful and worth the effort in the long run? John Carter (talk) 16:22, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

One small reason it gets neglected, is the confusing plethora of outofdate pages. From the overwhelming page and sidebar-template at WP:1.0, to the inactive bot-listings at WP:WikiProject Vital Articles. It might be good to cleanup (mark-inactive, redirect, merge, etc) some of the old pages, and reduce/refine the active pages, in order to focus future work. (eg the overlap between vital/core/etc)
I made a structured-listing a while ago, in the documentation area of Template:Core topics, of everything that seemed closely related/relevant, which might help. -- Quiddity (talk) 23:00, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Where is the download link

Where is the download link for the Wikipedia 1.0? Please provide a simple link to the 100 core articles in 1.0. This article is confusing. A lot of talking and no clear download links. 20:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.190.142.114 (talk)

Sorry, I missed seeing this earlier. There is no Wikipedia 1.0 at present - we're working towards it. This is a project talk page, for people to plan, discuss and work on developing things to help us get there. There is an older release, Version 0.8, available and we're starting work on Version 0.9 now. Walkerma (talk) 04:45, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Some fairly important articles that need work

User:WhatamIdoing has suggested picking out some articles for improvement. Using the release version tools, I've picked out some of the weak-but-fairly-important articles that we included in Version 0.8. Bear in mind that the importance here comes from no. of page hits, interwikis and links-in, so it is pretty objective. Here are some that need work, IMHO:

More later...! Walkerma (talk) 05:16, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Bot operator needed for the 1.0 bot

User:CBM (Carl) has been a valiant and devoted bot operator for several years now, and he completely rewrote the code (with some help from User:Titoxd). Unfortunately, real life is limiting his time to commit to maintaining the 1.0 bot, and so we are looking for someone new to take on the lead role. Carl has agreed to help go over the code and help with the transition. This bot is very important for thousands of WikiProjects and task forces, so it's critical to have someone committed to the task; however, it's mainly a maintenance role at this point, as the main bugs and feature requests have been dealt with.

This issue is also delaying our ability to work on the next offline release (Version 0.9). Until we get automated tools for producing selections (something the Foundation folks have been working on), the new bot operator would be needed for this purpose. Much of the article selection process involves some manual work - not a massive amount, but too much for Carl at the moment. Please help, so we can get going with Version 0.9! Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:02, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I expect that I don't have the skills to do the job, but for those who might, what exactly are you looking for? Experience with particular programming languages perhaps? Are there aspects of the work that can be taken on by someone without programming skills to relieve pressure on the coders? Road Wizard (talk) 06:11, 11 October 2012 (UTC)
Sorry I logged off before I saw your swift response! The bot is written in Perl, so a knowledge of that language would be essential. Some familiarity with the toolserver would be helpful. I added a link to the bot above (meant to do that last night!), and here are some related pages:
For people who wish to help, but who do not know Perl, the main tasks tend to be communicating with WikiProjects to handle problems, and helping WikiProjects set up for the bot correctly - creating relevant categories, etc. Carl has had to spend some of his maintenance time doing non-programming tasks like fixing wrongly-named category pages on the wiki to help a WikiProject get things working. Do you know Perl? Can you help? Many thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:56, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Bottom importance

I am not a participant in V1.0ET. My question is: where would Category:Bottom-importance articles fit into the scheme. I understand its an optional importance level, but is it to be incorporated into your work? Its not used much, i see. I think its a good idea that would especially help with larger WikiProjects, where the "low" articles number in the thousands, and do have some significant variation in importance.(Wikipedia:WikiProject California is the one i work on, along with the San Francisco Bay Area taskforce).Mercurywoodrose (talk) 18:57, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I may be wrong, but I believe articles are selected for the release versions using quality ratings and a mixture of the various importance ratings set by different projects. The basic premise is that the most important and highest quality articles make it in to the release. Articles that are rated as low importance are less likely to make it in to the release (with the caveat that a low importance article for one project may be the most important article for another project).
Bottom importance ratings will affect the selection process but I can't quantify the level of impact. Road Wizard (talk) 21:17, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Yep, Road Wizard is correct - there are very few Low-importance articles that will make it into our selections, and those that do are probably multiply or wrongly assessed (e.g., Einstein is quite correctly only mid importance for WP:New Jersey specifically, but he is very important overall). So we wouldn't expect to use Bottom importance. That could change if (a) lots of WikiProjects use it extensively and (b) we start producing selections of several million. I see no problem, though, with WikiProjects using it internally if they find it useful. It would be best if the bot reads them as Low-importance for the time being, but even if not the other importance metrics will still filter them out. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 22:16, 14 October 2012 (UTC)
Very helpful. I will for myself consider how i would break out Low from Bottom in the workgroup i am involved in. If it seems useful, i may propose it. But i see how that currently doesnt affect the selection process much if any.(mercurywoodrose)Mercurywoodrose (talk) 19:28, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Eyes

Could a few people watchlist Template:Grading scheme? Someone made changes to it over a year ago that relegate all unsourced articles to "Stub class", no matter how long the article is. The "discussion" that preceded the change was a note at a single WikiProject (with no replies about the proposal to raise the requirements), which is completely inadequate.

We're going to look silly if we start labeling really long pages as "Stubs" simply because they have the most common (about a quarter million articles affected) problem with their development. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:38, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually I'd agree with the other editor. If there are no sources then the whole text could be legitimately wiped at a moment's notice. It is automatically a stub as it does not have the sourcing to achieve Start class. According to the Start class criteria, "the article should... provide enough sources to establish verifiability." Road Wizard (talk) 05:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
The view here has always been that a stub-class article should be a stub, i.e., essentially a dictionary definition. I hadn't seen the subtle change (thank you for catching it!), but it does help explain why recently I've seen a few longer articles rated as stubs. I used to watch that template carefully (as well as WP:ASSESS which includes it), but I've been on WP less, and apparently about 85 others missed the edit as well!
Part of the rationale for creating C-class a few years ago was to distinguish between articles that are "on the way" with some references (but not yet at B) from articles that are beyond-stubs - section headings and paragraphs, etc. - but not sourced. Since C-Class was created, I've always taken Start to be either a short article (a decent length paragraph) with some good solid references, or a longer article (several paragraphs) with 0-2 references. (For context - Prior to 2008, even a B-Class article was allowed to have zero sources, and prior to 2006 FAs didn't need inline references!) If we insist Start-Class have sources, then we end up needing to create another level for unsourced articles too long to be stubs. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 16:09, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Road, the basic definition has been "An article that is developing, but which is quite incomplete and, most notably, lacks adequate reliable sources." Inadequate sourcing is the biggest reason for a longer article being Start-class. Remember that the absence of citations isn't the same as being unverifiable. This old version of Cancer contains zero sources, but every word in it is WP:Verifiable, and it's far too long to be classified as a stub. WP:STUB says, "Sizable articles are usually not considered stubs, even if they have significant problems or are noticeably incomplete." Being unreferenced is a significant problem, but it is not the definition of a stub. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:13, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
I think we are having a misunderstanding about {{unreferenced}} articles and ones with {{no footnotes}}. The Cancer article you linked to contained 5 sources (listed as external links) so would have been sufficiently referenced to meet WP:V. My opinion is that if you have a very long article without a single source in any format then it fails WP:V and can't reach start class. As soon as you add a single external link (or other general source) then it is not unreferenced and can meet the minimum requirement for start class. Footnotes and citations mainly have an impact on C class and above. Road Wizard (talk) 18:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
WP:V does not agree with you. See WP:MINREF for a complete list of what's actually required to have a citation. If you create an article that contains none of these, then you are not required to have a single ref of any sort anywhere on the page. List of planets, for example, mentions no people, contains no direct quotations, and isn't likely to have any material challenged. WP:V therefore accepts its unreferenced state. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:51, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Actually List of planets does have an element likely to be challenged - the definitions of planets and dwarf planets. While an international group of scientists may have decided to call Pluto a dwarf planet it is a fairly recent decision that disagrees with all preceding source material. A citation is definitely needed. Road Wizard (talk) 09:54, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
Please see the section on WP:SOURCES; "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources." If you don't provide any source material then you may have failed WP:NOR; "you must be able to cite reliable, published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and directly support the material being presented." Road Wizard (talk) 10:08, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
No, read that again: "you must be able to cite reliable, published sources", not "you must have already cited them". Read the footnote in that paragraph: "Articles that currently name zero references of any type may be fully compliant with this policy — so long as there is a reasonable expectation that every bit of material is supported by a published, reliable source". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:10, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Logs reporting ?? data

Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Philosophy_articles_by_quality_log

The logs are showing the opposite of what is happening. For instance, the log reports that the quality rating on Emptiness was changed from Start-Class to Unassessed-Class, when it was really changed from Unassessed-Class to Start-Class. This is also happening at the WikiProject Politics log. Greg Bard (talk) 05:01, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

It's also happening at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/English non-league football articles by quality log with Spelthorne Sports F.C. Del♉sion23 (talk) 12:54, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
This sounds like the same problem as reported at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index#Problem with class flipping. Road Wizard (talk) 13:31, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Starting work on Wikipedia Version 0.9

After an earlier aborted start, we can now begin work on preparing our next general collection, Version 0.9. We now have the technical help to put the collection together. We're having a meeting on the #wikipedia-1.0 IRC channel at 02:00 UTC very earlier on Sunday morning to discuss putting the article list together - please join us if you can help. We will need someone to help write a simple bot script for contacting all the WikiProjects, too - this will be one of the first tasks (probably next week). I'll expect to post an update here after the meeting. Walkerma (talk) 05:33, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Things are still held up, waiting for the master list to be produced. There's a bug, causing the code to go really slowly, so until we sort that out we can't work on Version 0.9. Walkerma (talk) 04:50, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

List of articles without talk pages? List of articles without WikiProject templates?

If anyone is aware of such lists could they comment at Wikipedia:VPM#List_of_articles_without_an_assigned_Wikiproject.3F? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 19:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Misunderstanding of Book-class

Comments are invited at Template talk:WPBannerMeta#Misunderstanding of Book-class. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:42, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Article assessments

When updating a WikiProject assessment on an article talk pages tagged with {{WP1.0}}, should we change the Version 1.0 assessment, add |reassess=yes to the 1.0 tag or do something else? VanIsaacWS Vexcontribs 08:42, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Good question! (Sorry I was slow to answer.) I would say, go ahead and change the Version 1.0 assessment for quality (not for importance). Since 1.0 is a "global" project, we often tag for quality based on what subject-experts have assessed. The tag is less needed now than in "olden times" when often an important article had no WikiProject banner, and the 1.0 assessment was the only one available. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 14:19, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if this is the right place to ask... The article Rationalism has been improved by Joshuafilmer. I think it should be re-assessed and probably upgraded. MrBill3 (talk) 04:40, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Log problem

Hi, has there been a change in the bot recently as there is now a problem with the log files not showing the name space information for non-article name spaces such as Category. This can be seen on the last entry for 3 June in this log. Also causes red links as per 2 June entries in the same log. Keith D (talk) 12:35, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe this thread at WP:VPM is related, and might contain answers (I noted some related problems at the top, but haven't had a chance to read the responses since). –Quiddity (talk) 20:44, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
Does not appear to have answers on a quick scan. This appears to have happened recently as about a fortnight ago things were OK. I have a feeling that this has happened a couple of years ago as well so may be some fix was removed. Keith D (talk) 21:36, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Removing importance

Hi, I think this is probably the best place to ask (apologies if not). Recently, WikiProject EastEnders decided to remove importance from its articles. I removed it from the banner template and removed the parameter from some talk pages, and just simply saved-without-changing others that didn't use it, and they started to vanish from the categories. Many of them vanished of their own accord, and of the thousands of pages (including redirects), only 70 now remain. Is there anything that can be done so these 70 pages are gone from User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/EastEnders, because Category:NA-importance EastEnders articles is now empty, and they all seem to be pages where I edited the talk page. –anemoneprojectors– 15:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry I can't help; it seems that the Meta template automatically assigns NA-class to all articles assessed as Redirect-Class. I'll see if I can track down someone who can reset that - as you know, that template is pretty complex! In the meantime, please let us know if you find out how to reset it. Walkerma (talk) 05:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks. There were well over 1000 redirects and now only 70, so I have no idea. –anemoneprojectors– 09:50, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

changing general disclaimer because there are no current efforts to highlight reliable versions of articles.

See proposal at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Correction_to_general_disclaimer. Cheers. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:03, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Vital articles

Under what circumstances should articles be considered Vital (for the template)? Articles listed on the WP:Vital articles, or also those listed on WP:VA/E/subpages? Question also asked at Template talk:WP1.0. Ypnypn (talk) 14:12, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Quality writing: veracity & comprehensiveness don't be mattering no none ifs y'all ain't gots ya sum

Or, Quality writing: veracity and comprehensiveness are irrelevant if the writing is incomprehensible

As expressed on this page and multiple other related pages (see, for example, WP:1.0/A "...though the content and language quality are also factors."), quality writing is inferior to most other issues, such as citation, scope, and legal compliance. The Assessment page practically says, "Oh yeah, and, uh, we like stuff to be written real good." The only way to make it more clear that writing is an afterthought in this process is by explicitly saying, "Quality writing was an afterthought. Sorry about that, mate."

Consider the Wikipedia:List of policies page. Dozens of topics are highlighted, including don't be a sock puppet and don't self-identify as a pedophile, but "write well" is not explicitly on the page. At best, it is implicitly included in the See also section in the third level of an unordered list.

In reality, the quality of nearly all Wikipedia articles is only measured by scope, relevance, and citation. Until someone desires Wikipedia to designate the article as a good article, the writing quality is irrelevant. This is more evidence that writing is an afterthought and that the de facto Wikipedia policy is that writing is substantially inferior to nearly every other aspect of Wikipedia's existence.

If quality writing really is important, then it must receive attention equal to that of veracity and relevance. If quality writing is an unimportant as it seems, then I sincerely believe that the list of polices and this page should both explicitly describe its relative importance. The list of policies, for example, could state something like, "Nearly all other policies trump quality writing. If an article meets high standards in other aspects, then the quality of the writing will become more important. In all cases, however, it is preferable to sacrifice quality writing to achieve goals such as verifiability."

A warning such as the one above would prevent me from wasting my time improving the writing quality of an article: except for exceptionally minor edits, my edits are typically reverted or overwritten within hours. Until today, I did not understand the systemic bias against quality writing in favor of stability and dozens of other policies. (See, for example, Wikipedia:List of policies and good article criteria.)

A subjective anecdote about poor writing on Wikipedia

I have spent the last few hours navigating the labyrinth of Wikipedia:(XXXXX) pages because I was reading yet another Wikipedia article that was so poorly written that I wanted to cry. Because of the inexcusable and patently wrong statements in the article, I clicked on an internal link to find accurate information. The second article was at least as heartbreaking and painful to read as the first was. I decided to make one small edit on the second article because the error was so egregious that it distorted verifiable historical facts. I always check the talk page before making edits, but the talk page was even more disappointing.

I was disappointed because the talk page informed me that Continental Congress, the page I had intended to edit, is part of three projects: one project assigns it Top-importance and the other two assign High-importance. This important page had at least two significant errors in the first sentence that most 16-year-old Americans should be able to identify. But many (most?) Wikipedia users are not American, so the errors would be opaque to them. (For completeness, the original page I viewed was History of the United States dollar.)

Because I did not understand Wikipedia's quality grading, I investigated it before I made any edits. That began my unwitting journey to accidentally discover the Minotaur that devours good writing on Wikipedia: the de facto policy of sacrificing quality writing to appease the gods that govern other parts of Wikipedia and its articles (with the possible exceptions of Good articles and Featured articles).

The good news is that now I understand why my edits regularly die and when I feel the desire to improve Wikipedia, I will find avenues that might have an impact, instead of attempting to write using the digital equivalent of disappearing ink. hunterhogan (talk) 12:22, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorry to hear about your poor experience. Although I sometimes have things reverted, I have nearly always found that improvements in the quality of the writing are welcomed. However, I'm rather confused by your examples. You decry the emphasis on veracity, yet you equate factual errors in the Continental Congress article with poor writing. Surely veracity includes fixing "errors in the first sentence that most 16-year-old Americans should be able to identify"?
There is a valid reason for the emphasis, however. An article that is poorly written but factually accurate is, like many textbooks, still useful even if it is hard to read. An article that omits significant pieces of information can be misleading. Also, as you point out, Wikipedia is written by people from all over the world, and grammatical rules vary considerably. Do you write "the colour of aluminium", with the comma outside the inverted commas, or do you write "the color of aluminum," with the comma outside the quotation marks? (I'm a Brit in New York, so I have to switch constantly.) This variability in the language inevitably means that sometimes you may see a grammatical "error" that in another country is considered the correct form.
Having said all that, good writing still shines through in any form of English. In our offline releases, we have excluded some quite important and well-referenced articles simply because of the poor quality of the language. The Wikipedia community does value good writing, and for an article to reach Featured Article status it is seen as essential. If you would like to collaborate on improving any articles, let me know, and perhaps we can tackle it together, and I'll be sure to deal with any unsuitable reversions by well-meaning Wikipedians. Walkerma (talk) 05:11, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
@Hunterhogan: To address your specific complaint, I think "don't write badly" is not a policy on Wikipedia because "if you can't write well, don't write anything at all" is the opposite of the behavior we want to promote. While we prefer well-written prose, we also welcome people who know stuff but who have poor English skills or not a lot of time to add that content. Other people who do have good English skills are then encouraged to come along and tidy up. Indeed, the whole point of the article assessment process is to track and encourage progress, not only in scope and factual accuracy, but writing quality. As you can see on Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment, poorly written articles receive low grades ("C" or lower). To get to a "B" grade, an article must be well-written in addition to being suitably referenced, comprehensive, accessible, structured, and illustrated. I agree with Walkerma; it seems unusual that genuine improvements in quality would be reverted. When that happens, in my experience there is generally some sort of misunderstanding or mistake and a brief conversation will resolve the dispute. Looking at your edit history, it seems you have become involved in politically controversial edits related to global warming and Tibet. I can see how you would feel rather emotionally burned out after that; most people would. Clearly you are an active Wikipedia reader and a person with expertise in the finer points of English grammar and composition. Given you are unsatisfied with the quality of writing and want to do something about it, I would encourage you to give making small edits another try. I expect most of your edits will stand, but there will still be occasional reverts, some legitimate and some mistaken. I think you will have a much more pleasant experience if you assume good faith and also allow for the possibility that your own edit was in error or there is a some alternative which would be preferred after some consensus-building. I was just reading [1] and it seems there you took a revert which the reverting editor found factually justified as a personal insult. Terseness is common in edit summaries and is not a sign of rudeness. Indeed, their reply on the talk page seemed really polite. I'm sure if you had simply replied "Hi, this was reverted, but I think X means Y" and cite your sources, they would have politely replied with their rationale, and y'all could have amicably resolved your differences or identified the need for more research. If you don't have the time or energy to stick around and monitor the conversation, you can just drop a polite note on the talk page noting the revert, explaining your own rationale, and leave the question for others to resolve later. In my experience, with more edits articles do indeed become more informative, accurate, and well-written. I hope you can find a way for editing to be more fun and satisfying for you; I enjoy it because we so often learn something interesting from what others have written and even from resolving our initial disagreements. -- Beland (talk) 18:23, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Global list of highest priority items

I'm looking at the grid and right now there are 99 quality-unassessed articles of Top importance. I was trying to find a way to get a list of those articles, but all the categories seem to be Wikiproject-specific. I was going to spend some time grading Top-importance articles just to make those numbers better; maybe other editors would be similarly motivated if we had that available. Thanks, and thanks for this already-pretty-awesome product. -- Beland (talk) 18:25, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

You need the "Release Version Tools" (see the navigation template at top right) - more specifically, something like this. This allows you to list articles from ALL projects, and sort them by importance or external interest score (both are good but independent measures of importance), and I also put them in reverse quality order. The resultant table isn't perfect, but I think you'll find what you need. And THANK YOU! When we finally get a chance to make our next release - we're still trying to fix the software - we will really appreciate your work. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 05:03, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
@Walkerma: Oh, excellent. I started going through the list, and I'm curious what it means when Quality is "----"? I see that on some pages that are clearly already graded, both with {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} wrappers like Talk:Alexander Alekhine and simple tags like on Talk:Bishop (chess). -- Beland (talk) 02:08, 27 January 2014 (UTC)
To be honest, that baffled me as well! That column is supposed to show something like "B-Class". I will be sure to ask the people who wrote that code. However, these are a very small number out of the total, and perhaps represent ones with broken templates or categories.
Looking more closely, you perhaps want to start with this list, because you don't want to start work on List-Class article and the like. That page shows where the REAL quality ratings begin, and shows plenty of Stubs. When we first created this tool, the quality ratings were pretty much just that (starting with Stub as the lowest), but the WikiProjects added other classes to help them keep track of lists, etc.
If you look at the actual articles that were rated as Top/Stub, you can see that some probably do not deserve to be worked on. This reflects the facts that:
  1. Most truly important articles have long been improved to be better than Stub!
  2. Top importance relates to internal importance to the WikiProject, not to Wikipedia as a whole. For example, there are a lot of sports articles that are probably very important if you're an afficionado of the Green Bay Packers, but unimportant if you've never heard of that team! That is why, when we )the 1.0 team) put together a global collection, we adjust for the importance of the WikiProject in assessing an importance score.
  3. Sometimes people are enthusiastic - even fanatical - about one particular topic, person, etc. and they rank some obscure board game as "Top-importance" based on their own (rather biased!) view. If others from the WikiProject don't catch these, they can persist.
The External Interest (EI) score is a more objective number, because it's based on a combination of nos. of links-in, language versions, and page hits. For the article collections, we combine EI with the importance score, as we believe a machine/human combination is most helpful. Walkerma (talk) 15:09, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to restrict A-class use to big projects

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 110#Restrict A class usage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Query

  • "The next version will be version 0.9, which we hope to release some time in 2013."

Since there is no further information, I assume version 0.9 was never released. So, my question is, since this information hasn't been updated, is this an inactive project? I know the assessment continues but as far as this Version 1.0 project, is that on an indefinite hold? Liz Read! Talk! 00:09, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Version 0.9 was indeed never released. Unfortunately, the person who inherited the computer code (the code we used for 0.7 and 0.8) was unable to get it to work, and we haven't had anyone else offer to help. I'm fairly code-illiterate, and I've been busy on other things, and so in the absence of an computer programming expert to help we can't push things on.
BUT, the good news is that User:Kelson (who wrote the Kiwix code almost single-handedly, and has been very active on 1.0 projects since 2005 or so) has offered to turn his hand to fixing this over the summer. I will also have a lot of time to work on it too. So, please don't write the project off as "inactive" just yet - just on hold until June or July! With working code, the two of us will be able to oversee putting Version 0.9 together. Would you be able to help? Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Query (2)

Can anyone answer this question? --John (talk) 19:41, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

And again here. Sorry to be a bother but I haven't the faintest idea how this stuff works. --John (talk) 20:07, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation taking applications for two Wikipedian positions

Wiki Education Foundation is hiring two experienced Wikipedia editors for part-time (20 hours/week) positions: Wikipedia Content Expert, Sciences and Wikipedia Content Expert, Humanities. The focus of these positions is to help student editors do better work, through everything from advice and cleanup on individual articles, to helping instructors find appropriate topics for the students to work on, to tracking the overall quality of work from student editors and finding ways to improve it. We're looking for clueful, friendly editors who like to focus on article content, but also have a strong working knowledge of policies and guidelines, and who have experience with DYK, GAN, and other quality processes.

Part of these roles is likely to involve figuring out ways of systematically evaluating the quality of content contributed by program participants, so we're especially interested in editors with WP 1.0 experience.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:31, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

IPA font links gone

The font links have disappeared from International Phonetic Alphabet; see Talk:International Phonetic Alphabet#Font links gone. Please take any discussion to that Talk section, as I am also posting this note to a couple of projects' Talk pages. Thnidu (talk) 05:00, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Good - it looks to be fixed now. Walkerma (talk) 02:51, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Primary School invitation

Hi everybody. On behalf of the teams behind the Wikipedia Primary School research project, I would like to announce that the articles Sexism, Bicycle, South Africa, Nelson Mandela, Apartheid, of interest to this team, were selected a while ago to be reviewed by external experts. We'd now like to ask interested editors to join our efforts and improve the articles before March 15, 2015 (any timezone) as they see fit; a revision will be then sent to the designated experts for review (for details, please see each articles' talk page). Any notes and remarks written by the external experts will be made available on the articles' talk pages under a CC-BY-SA license as soon as possible, so that you can read them, discuss them and then decide if and how to use them. Please sign up here to let us know you're collaborating. Thanks a lot for your support! Elitre (WPS) (talk) 17:27, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Statistics bot link?

What's the link to the Statistics bot v1.0? I lost the link to it. Adamdaley (talk) 04:19, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Reply on your talk page. Walkerma (talk) 15:26, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Links to wrong space

When looking at the Articles list for Draft class articles, the listed articles link to article space and not draft space. Is there a fix in the works for this? - X201 (talk) 09:53, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I think Draft-Class is a non-standard class, introduced after the list code was written, so it'll be tricky to get this done. We don't have anyone writing new code for us at the moment, but if we get someone I'll make sure it's put on the list. Walkerma (talk) 19:25, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

What happened to the bot updating the subpages

For example, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Japan-related articles by quality statistics hasn't been updated since January 2010. It seems the bot only updates this template:

 FA A GABCStartStub FLListCategoryDisambigDraft FMFilePortalProjectRedirectTemplateNA???Total
14155132,0206,60435,96543,044332,76319,3965961981263611431572,9492,07728388117,507
WikiProject Japan  articles by quality     Refresh

Any way to get the bot to update Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Japan-related articles by quality statistics, too? ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:09, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Nevermind, I figured out how the bot was updating things. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 18:58, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Overcounting

Hey All, please respond at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index#Double_counting.3F , Sadads (talk) 15:03, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikimedia in Outer Space

Dear @Walkerma:, @BozMo:, @Nominaladversary:,

I am interested in sending an electronic copy of certain articles of several languages of Wikipedia into outer space on various spacecraft and also transmittal. This would be the ultimate offline use of Wikimedia because no one has done this before.

I have contact with two space organizations and would like to use a version of your project to send into outer space. The main reason is that you seem to have a method in place of gathering quality articles.

Please feel free to contact me at Wikimedia Idea Lab.

My best regards, Gerald Shields w:en:user:geraldshields11 Geraldshields11 (talk) 20:29, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Nice idea! I just found out this week that we should be able to work on putting together a WP:EN new collection (version 0.9) this summer, so I'll be in touch if/when it's ready - probably this autumn. Walkerma (talk) 19:28, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Dear @Walkerma:, I am now officially the team person for Lunar Mission One cultural public database. I am now working on two separate project to send wikis into outer space. Please try to make an announcement to your twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook followers using my meta project link. Thank you in advance. Geraldshields11 (talk) 12:19, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Congratulations! I don't do much social media, but I'll keep you posted. Walkerma (talk) 06:52, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes, it is going well. Geraldshields11 (talk) 16:22, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Grants:IEG/Wikipedia likes Galactic Exploration for Posterity 2015

Dear @Walkerma:, @BozMo:, @Nominaladversary:

People suggested that I consult with fellow Wikipedians to get feedback and help to improve my idea about "launching Wikipedia via space travel." I rewrote my earlier idea. I still plan to use your work to send into outer space.

Please see the 2015 idea at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wikipedia_likes_Galactic_Exploration_for_Posterity_2015. Please post your suggestions on the talk page and please feel free to edit the idea and join the project.

Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. I appreciate it.

My best regards, Geraldshields11 (talk) 21:42, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

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