Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors

Copyright violation

Copyright violation is one of the most feared problems on Wikipedia. With the Guild, we have a large number of editors sifting through some of Wikipedia's worst and most overlooked articles, where many pieces of copyright-violating text are probably lurking. Copy editors who don't notice a problem might even leave the offending text in place while making the violation more difficult to detect. I realize that a thorough check for copyright violation is a laborious task, but could we at least ask drive participants to do something basic, like running articles through User:CorenSearchBot/manual before a copy edit? A. Parrot (talk) 20:41, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea, and it will help us clear the backlog faster, too. But I'm on record that we really ought to be getting some help with this rather than having to check every little thing ourselves; User:Mdennis (WMF) is checking into whether we can get some help from the WMF, from Amazon or from the publishers themselves. - Dank (push to talk) 21:41, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Banners and their usage

I have raised a question on the drive page concerning banners and how they are being used. Chaosdruid (talk) 00:56, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Copyright review?

Hi. :) Would you guys consider encouraging copy editors to look for signs of copyright violations before they begin their work, maybe at Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to? There would be three advantages to this: (1) it is relatively easy to find copy-pasting when it is "as placed." You just have to search for a couple of text strings and see what matches, or even run a duplication detector comparing the article to sources so precisely copied strings pop out; (2) it can save the copy editors a lot of wasted time if somebody finds out later, after their investment, that they were working on unusable base (I've made no secret of the fact that it really bothers me to see volunteer hours wasted refining something we can't keep. :/); and (3) it might avoid the copyright issue being missed because the content has been changed just enough that it is not as apparent to others.

I realize that many copy editors are already conscious of the issue, but I know that it's easy to develop tunnel vision when you're used to focusing on one task. (I remember once working on an article on the copyright problems board, I was about to mark it clear of copyright problems and return it to the wilds before I realized that - copyright problem or no - it was a massive BLP violation. I'm so used to looking for copying that I don't always even process what I'm reading. :D) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 20:38, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Moonridden Girl. Thank you for your important reminder. I have added some instructions for detecting copyright violations to our Beginner's guide and placed a notice in our Ombox. Please feel free to edit the material if need be. --Dianna (talk) 05:49, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Diannaa! That's great. :) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 12:31, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Let's cut the cr...

...uft! (Well, what did you think I was going to say?)

Anyone who has taken part in a drive and tried to clear some of the longest-tagged articles will have noticed that a very high proportion of them are cruft of some kind. Quite often, multiple issues have been tagged since the Jurassic, but nobody has come back to try and do something about it. Those articles -- vanity articles, over-long in-universe plot summaries, etc -- are a real drag to edit, and I'm sure many copy editors lose interest in the face of such a depressing wall of rubbish. Meanwhile, both the requests pages are heavily backlogged, and work on them, which was going brilliantly in December, has come virtually to a standstill.

I suspect this wall of cruft is losing us contributors. So, for a couple of weeks, I've been trawling through the oldest months still to have articles tagged {{copy edit}}, and seeing if any can be removed. A couple have been sent to {{Rough translation}}, one copyvio investigation has been launched, and I've detagged about 10% of the rest (on the grounds that they need a complete rewrite, so why copy edit the pre-rewrite version?), putting {{GOCEreviewed}} on their talk pages instead. If anyone wants to know which ones, I'm keeping a list at User:Stfg/GOCEreviewed.

I hope this exercise will make future drives more enjoyable, but the trouble is, I'm only detagging about 10%, far less than the real amount of cruft. This is basically from timidity. An article is about an arguably notable subject, is justifiably tagged for copy edit in the sense that it certainly is badly written, so isn't that what we're here for? So then one leaves it tagged. But should one?

I'm tempted to suggest that if an article has been tagged with tags indicating a need for major (re)creation of content, such as inadequacy of references, tags such as like-resume, all-plot, etc, and empty sections waiting to be written, and if nobody is interested enough in the article to tackle the content problems after some length of time (6 months, say?), then maybe we shouldn't feel too obliged either, and unless a copy editor chooses to work on such an article, {{GOCEreviewed}} could be made semi-automatic. I've done a brain dump of the sort of things that might make us want to spurn an article (and what might not) at User:Stfg/Sandbox2; any comments on its talk page would be welcome.

What do you think? --Stfg (talk) 17:28, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Clearly a great start and a good idea. - Dank (push to talk) 19:46, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for not responding sooner. Unfortunately I do not have the editing time available any more to help out for many hours a day like I used to do. I was hoping to at some point begin pre-checking articles for copy vio and cruft concerns, and did do some of this during the January drive. Copy vios can be easy to spot (large blocks of unwikified text being dropped into the article on a single edit; prose of better quality than the rest of the article), but it is hella easier to find the source early on, before the material starts appearing in Wikipedia mirrors all over the internet. Unfortunately User:Coren and User:CorenSearchBot are MIA at present. Overall a Stfg has a good idea that would help manage the backlog and make better use of our only resource: the time of our volunteers. --Dianna (talk) 20:08, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Stfg, you have identified part of the reason why I have not contributed as much in recent drives as I did in the past (although the largest reason is that I just don't have as much time anymore). I've been spending more of my copy editing time responding to request articles (many of which don't have a "copy edit" tag on them, so that doing them does not decrease the "tagged" articles in the backlog). These days I am less eager to even take a peak at the oldest tagged articles because I know of the high probability of coming across disaster articles. I would support any efforts to somehow get rid of the hopelessly-in-need-of-a-rewrite-(or-deletion) articles. --Tea with toast (話) 03:10, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

cleanup template

You might be interested to know that the {{cleanup}} template is being considered for deletion at WP:TFD. Bwrs (talk) 23:59, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and this has led to a small eruption(*) of people changing it to {{copyedit}} without changing the date, causing old monthly copyedit categories to be recreated. I'm re-dating them when spotted, but if anyone can think of an efficient way to get the message across ... --Stfg (talk) 01:15, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

(*) For anyone who likes those silly collective nouns: an eruption of drive-by taggers? --Stfg (talk) 01:15, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Clean-up and copy edit are actually not the same thing. Clean-up usually relates to sloppy formatting or wikification needs, whereas true copy editing involves only the prose. I have left a note at the deletion discussion page. Hopefully I don't sound too anal, he he. -- Dianna (talk) 06:26, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

(←) Now a request has been made at Template talk:Copy edit#Compatibility tweak to alter the parameters of the {{Copy edit}} template, saying "This will allow one to change {{cleanup}} (and any of a large number of other templates) to {{copy edit}} with less muss and fuss." User:Anomie has done that, without consultation here. We're going to get dumped on. The template is fully protected. Can we get this reverted, please? --Stfg (talk) 18:26, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

The template deletion discussion closed yesterday with no consensus to delete. Thank bog, as there are 26,085 articles requiring clean-up, dating back to 2007. Some eager tagger added the tag to over 7000 articles in August 2011 alone. No one seems to be working on this maintenance category, so Guild editors are reminded that we can be dealing with clean-up when we visit the article. I like to do everything possible to bring the article up to standards, even during copy edit drives.

Examples of possible clean-up (not an exhaustive list)

Clean up funky tables

Clean up old code and replace with wiki mark-up

Reduce over-linking (unlink common words and duplicate links)

Improve layout and section headers

Move pictures around for better appearance

Run the dashes, Advisor, and general formatting scripts:

importScript("User:GregU/dashes.js");
importScript('User:Cameltrader/Advisor.js');

--Dianna (talk) 19:32, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Where does one insert the 'importScript' code? --Greenmaven (talk) 05:33, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

You put it in your commons.js. You can do it yourself by following the instructions at User talk:GregU/dashes.js and at User:Cameltrader/Advisor. Or if you want me to install the scripts for you, I could do that. --Dianna (talk) 06:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I will do it, (thanks) --Greenmaven (talk) 03:56, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Gerunds

I have noticed that it has become extremely common for the wrong pronoun to be used before a gerund. For example, searching "him being" returns nearly 4000 results. Have these become acceptable on Wikipedia, or should these be changed to "his being?" If they should be changed, could this be the task of a bot? (Not that I know how to make one.)14jbella (talk) 20:40, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

You're right, and I fear the language is evolving that way. Apparently it's called a "fused participle". The news clips on the BBC Red Button service have them about once every three sentences, which drives me bonkers! Is it possible to define the rules for a bot, so that it wouldn't generate too many false positives? Lacking a bot, I think it's good to change any instances you find that read poorly (i.e. most of them). By the way, you might like User:Tony1/Noun plus -ing. --Stfg (talk) 22:10, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

"John Doe was ungainly, due to being a robot" is almost workable, but very ugly. Are there even more horrible constructions that I haven't imagined? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:21, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Ah wait, so you're saying that "John Doe was ungainly, due to him being a robot" is the real problem? If so, isn't this the same sort of issue as the proliferation of "located off of" et cetera? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:23, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Same sort of issue in what way? (By the way -- "due to"? <g>) --Stfg (talk) 22:37, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't thought about it, but after reading that guide, I realize it would probably be very difficult for a bot to detect these subtleties. 14jbella (talk) 02:51, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes. The Transitional fossil article has this: "While it is easy to imagine natural selection producing the variation seen within genera and families, ...". I suppose "producing" here is a gerund, but tagging 's on to "selection" would be awful, wouldn't it? Hey ho! --Stfg (talk) 12:31, 25 February 2012 (UTC)