Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors

Question on the Language desk

Hi all, there's a question on the Language Ref Desk that is pure copyediting, just made for all of you. I thought some of you might like to take a look, and I for one would be very interested to see any of your replies. IBE (talk) 23:22, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Trial for FAC Requests page

At the top of the FAC Requests page, it says that the page is undergoing a trial. In the discussion that led to the page's creation, HJ Mitchell mentioned a month-long trial, but after a month no further discussion was made.

In my opinion, the FAC Requests page, although slow-moving, has proven to be beneficial to the Guild, and should be a permanent addition to the Guild. What does everyone else think? The Utahraptor^Talk/_Contribs 03:21, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree. --Stfg (talk) 08:54, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

It's a good idea and I think we could do more with it, but I don't want to pull anyone away from the January copyediting drive. Comments are welcome now, though. - Dank (push to talk) 12:22, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

@Utahraptor. It is less than slow moving. I added a request on 20 Jan at which point there were 22 requests in front of it in the queue. There are still 22 today with no sign that any of them are being actively worked on. Seems to me that as a requester, I might be better off adding at the main list. SpinningSpark 19:02, 3 February 2012 (UTC)

• Not sure anyone is maintaining that page, since forex W.E.B. DuBois is already FA (so the request should be deleted). Ling.Nut3 (talk) 11:22, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting that. I've removed the request, as FAC examines prose very thoroughly. I've just checked through the whole list, and there are no other promoted ones just now. I've transferred two that are GANs to the main requests page. All the others are GA except: List of chronometers on HMS Beagle, which is currently C-class but aiming to become FL, and DNA nanotechnology, which is B-class but has received a FAC review encourging it to come back to FAC soon. I'm not sure if these were correct decisions: any comment please? --Stfg (talk) 14:07, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

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)