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Heads up regarding WPBio Assessment Drive

I'd like to be proactive and give you all a "heads-up" that the Biography project is starting a new Summer Article Assessment drive (primary purpose would be to populate the class tag in the WP Bio banner on talk pages of biographical articles.) So you may be seeing some script-aided activity, by editors placing/editing WPBio banners on talk pages. I will be participating in the assessment drive (on a small scale, not using scripts); note that I've placed a comment on the drive's talk page requesting the avoidance of the use of the "infobox-needed" parameter. I'm letting "you-all" know this, because I think you'd feel less alarmed being aware of it ahead of time, rather than just suddenly seeing a lot of script-assisted activity; I'm hoping that my note here won't, at this time, generate a lot of comments at the talk page above; I think in this case keeping things very cordial and not putting too much emphasis on something that may not even become an issue is advisable. If you find that the drive is seeming to generate activity other than populating the class parameter (and possibly the working-group parameters) in the WPBio banners, and you feel such activity is disruptive, I'd appreciate it if you'd talk to me about it; I would attempt to clear up situations where the cause is misunderstanding of the objective of the assessment drive by some participants. Thanks, Lini 12:43, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Lini, for the heads-up. Yes, I noticed this going on last night -- apparently there is a contest going on to see who can assess the most biography articles, with prizes to be awarded. What concerns me, and will probably affect the opera project as well, is that people are assessing articles "stub", "start", "B", etc., at a high rate of speed, evidently without looking at anything other than the article's general length and appearance. I infer this from the speed of the ratings: about one article per minute in the case of the person who tore through the biographies in my watch list, biographies of obscure 14th-century composers for whom I have given fairly complete writeups based on available sources (such as Grove), calling them all "start-class". (Why can't a short, but complete, article be something other than "start-class"?) What significance does this "start-class" rating actually have? Can we safely ignore it, or do we need to organize a rebellion against this tagging drive, sometimes carried out by people who know nothing either about the articles they are assessing or the sources from which they can be written? Shouldn't the rater be required to leave detailed comments on why a rating was given?

I have to admit I'm a little worried about this drive. Does anyone have ideas on how to deal with it? Antandrus (talk) 14:25, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

No, Antandrus, I have not a clue. It's a like a cyclone, I think. You hide while it happens and clean up the mess afterwards.

Here's a comment on this I left on User talk:Geogre a while back:

Just picking up on some of this: I've had plenty of the articles I've written for DYK - all of which, naturally, lack infoboxes - classed as Start when as far as I can see they comfortably pass WP:WPBIO's own criteria for at least B-class. Now, I don't care a hoot about these silly ratings one way or the other, but something like William Savage is surely one of the best resources you'll find on him anywhere, even if you do shell out 200 quid for Grove, or somehow get hold of a copy of Steven's 18th-century bio of him. The article is decently written and well-referenced, and leaves nothing out. All illustrates the folly of this mass-grading scheme. Moreschi Talk 18:05, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

That about sums it up. Oh , well, once it's over, we can pick the pieces. Moreschi ^Talk 14:36, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Just a note to add that the banners include a "comment" link where the assessor can say why (s)he gave the article a particular rating. Hardly any (maybe none?) of the assessors in our area do any such thing. --GuillaumeTell 14:32, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Agree with all the above objections (no disrespect to Lini, who is one of the most reasonable members of WP:BIO). I regard these "30-second assessments" as a form of incivility. There is no way an article editors have often spent a lot of time researching and creating can be properly rated like that. As GT says, hardly any of the assessors leave comments. If I see any assessment beyond "stub" which has no comments on the talk page, I will simply remove the template. --Folantin 14:56, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

As a participant in making the assessments, my understanding is: there is a big push to get all biographical articles assessed as stub, start, or B. I'd maintain this level of assessment can usually (but not always) be done fairly quickly, based on the presence or absence of various components (sections, references, external links, categories, etc.) (Also see Ssilvers' remarks above, under the section about Opera project assessments). I agree that B-class can cover a lot of territory. I think that detailed reviews, including assessing quality of content (as opposed to presence of components), and providing comments, would pertain more to the step of upgrading a B-class article to a "Good Article" rating. I'd imagine some conceivable future plan might be to begin reviewing B-class articles in such a way, but this would require much more knowledge of the subject, more time, documenting with comments etc, and would have to be done in a totally different way; also I don't imagine such reviews being done for articles associated with opera topics other than by people already connected in some way with the articles, or at the request of those who are.

Moreschi, and Antandrus, I do, however, agree with you that quick, bulk assessments of the "life-stage" of the article (stub-start-B), may mistake a relatively new and/or relatively short article, on a less well-known subject for a stub or start, when it should be a 'B'. I'd be happy to look at any of those, and re-assess. I've also been under the impression, though, as has been implied above, that many of you think the WPBio ratings aren't worthwhile (and I'm not troubled by having a difference of opinion about that), so I've not attempted to make it a priority to apply what I think would be the most appropriate ratings to many of the opera- or composer- related articles. (In general, better to leave things alone than to make waves where not wanted?)

I also go along with the view that if you generally disapprove of / disagree with the whole thing, as long as the only thing that is being done is populating an assessment parameter in the WPBio Banner, (which you are probably planning to ignore?), then just let it happen, and "pick up the pieces", as you said; although seriously, if you think somehow damage is being done, other than just an irritation, I'd like to know, in the interests of trying to minimize conflict between WPBio and other projects, where possible.

(I have my name listed in the "contest" for number of assessments, just for the purpose of being a participant in a "community" activity, but "lots of edits" of any type, is not the way I work, so the fact that I'm listed there at all, may, in fact, be rather laughable.)

Thanks, Lini 15:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure that this isn't the place for it, but, while I'm reading Lini's sensible remarks here, what the heck: I wonder whether WPBio might be better employed dealing with biographical articles that aren't within the purview of other project(s). In the case of composers, there are three projects (WP:Composers, WP:WPO, WP:CM), which seem to coexist quite happily; and a lot of singers may well be covered by both of the latter two. What does WPBio have to bring to the table that isn't here already? --GuillaumeTell 17:39, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Lini, I would welcome you review of our (mostly mine and Marc's) assessments of the WP:G&S articles. I'd appreciate, where you disagree with any of the current assessments there, letting me know. I may be too close to an article to give it an unbiased assessment, but you may have more of the perspective of a user of the encyclopedia. Best regards, -- Ssilvers 17:44, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the great comments Lini. To my understanding part of the disappointment comes from the idea that someone from outside a field of interest is going to be able to perform assessments (beyond stub-non-stub) at all. I think that Wikipedia has grown to the point where editing "off the top of your head" is getting harder and harder. If editors now need to cite sources inline, be ever more vigilant in avoiding systematic bias, and so on, I would think that the level of professionalism of assessments should also be increasing in equal measure. If one gives an assessment level which says that an article has obvious gaps (B-start-stub), I don't think it's unreasonable to, for instance, name one source from which these gaps could be filled. That probably means at least having a copy of Encyclopedia Brit. on-line or JSTOR available while assessing.

I also think that these banners need to have a discussion space in them -- they're taking pride of place at the top of the talk page--the least they should do is encourage talking.

For our part though it seems that the greatest outraged feeling comes when an article is assessed as start which is complete and nearly-FA (in quality if not in importance). We could probably do more to help assessors in recognizing these articles by nominating more obscure articles for GA and participating in GA assessments for music articles. It's not operatic, but figure I should mention that I just nominated an article I wrote, Egardus, for GA, since it's really not missing much of anything; though I figured for Medieval composers it made more sense to list under History->Biography than with all the rock bands in Musicians. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 17:46, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict with Bill Tell; but, yeah, I agree with his point about maybe no assessing these; the > 100,000 unassessed WP:BIO articles does not say to me, "We need to assess faster!" it instead says, "huh, maybe our project idea is a bit too big.") -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 17:46, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree with GT and Myke. We work very well with our sibling projects, Composers and Classical Music, as well as the G&S offshoot (and, I hope, the Wagner one when it gets into the swing of things). WP:BIO is way too ambitious. Maybe the problem with Wikipedia is that there aren't enough projects; the more specific they are, the more useful in my experience. --Folantin 17:51, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I think you have a good point there. BIO is too big, and people are assessing things way outside of their areas of expertise. Egardus is a good example: if it had the Bio banner, it almost certainly would have been tagged as "start class" by now, by someone who'd never even heard of him.

(adding in a note here at a later time) - I've taken the liberty of adding a Good Article nomination tag to the talk page of Egardus, and the WPBio tag with a B-class assessment; this should pre-empt it being incorrectly assessed as stub- or start- class. --Lini 10:58, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

The meta-issue, in my opinion, is that it has become a lot harder to work on Wikipedia in the last couple years, and newcomers with a lot of energy, perceiving that the encyclopedia is already built, are looking for things to do: along with vandal-fighting, infoboxing and tagging are relatively easy activities that don't seem to need either expertise or access to sources. As most of us know, however, they do require some expertise to be done right. Therefore they are best done from within focused projects. Antandrus (talk) 18:00, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Certainly, as a member of the Biography project, I could agree with several of the statements above. I agree that there can and have been rather short articles which do effectively sum up all available knowledge of a given subject, even if that isn't much. Maximus the Confessor is one such. But it is hard to know that in advance as an outsider. Also, another very short article, Pope Soter, contains literally everything known about the subject, and is still classed as a stub. The same thing has been said about Egardus above. All these assessments mean in these cases, I think, is that these articles aren't likely to be included in any CD or similar releases anytime soon. However, many or most of these articles probably wouldn't be included anyway, so that probably isn't that big an issue. I do think that these ratings are generally done to help a given project know which stage of "development" articles are at, so that people can know which ones are most likely to potentially reach GA status or similar, and to help the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team to know which articles are most likely eligible for inclusion in a release version. Whether the biography project is too ambitious is a question I can't answer, other than to say that it makes sense to me that some group at least monitor all the Biographies of living persons articles. Regarding the sibling projects, Wikipedia:WikiProject Musicians is now a subproject of Biography, and you might be able to request reassessment there if you find an existing assessment faulty. I think I will personally probably not be actively assessing any of the articles relevant to your group, but I can't say I won't be. If I do, and you disagree with it, please let me know and why you disagree and I can change thinkgs. But the fact that there are currently over 100,000 biographies articles that haven't been assessed, not counting those which haven't even been "tagged" yet, indicates that there may be several of at least good quality which just haven't been "reviewed" yet, and this may be one of the few ways to get that sort of thing done. This isn't necessarily because the project is "too big", but that there hasn't been enough attention given to assessment. There are more than a few other projects with longstanding assessment units which haven't even done as high a percentage of assessments as Biography, but there much larger size makes it look worse than it might factually be. Considering how recent a development assessment is, that really isn't that big a surprise. Anyway, sorry for taking up so much space. John Carter 18:10, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

As Myke implies above, I don't think we're going to get anything very useful from the Musicians project. It reminds me of the review sections in newspapers: there's something called "Music" and there's something else (if you're lucky) called "Classical". --GuillaumeTell 17:59, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't necessarily disagree. However, I do note that that project is already a "subproject" of WP:WPBIO, so it might not be impossible for further subprojects to be formed as work groups of it. Certainly, if one were to have concerns over the size of such a project, proposals could be made for subprojects which might "divide" their scope and make it more managable. Certainly, I've been involved in the creation of at least a few new "work groups" and the like from the Project proposals page. John Carter 18:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Like other members of the three (genuine) music projects, I think the WP:BIO assessments just leave detritus on WP pages.

There is a potential role for the Biography Project in WP in encouraging development and better editing of biographical articles. This is the way that print projects such as the DNB Dictionary of National Biography have contributed to traditional publishing. The problem here is that WP:BIO is launching these WP-wide projects at a time when their editing standards are much lower than that of the specialized projects affected, hence the inevitable conflict and time wasting for all concerned. -- Kleinzach 03:10, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

As we more and more are discussing WP:BIO, I feel sort of bad to do it here, rather than there, but nonetheless, I'll continue: it seems like there are two completely different concerns in biography: assessing the importance of historical figures and their articles and dealing with all the extra concerns around living persons--an extremely important concern which definitely needs a Wikiproject. However, I see the WP 1.0 project as basically separate from either of these two projects. Though the CD/DVD project is not of personal importance, I can see how assessments might help it. However, if that's what assessments are supposed to be for, I think they should be more explicitly tied to the WP project: "This article is assessed by WP:BIO as CD class: an essential article to be found in every distributed version of Wikipedia" vs. "This article is assessed by WP:BIO as HD300 class: an article which we should endeavor to include only in versions of Wikipedia distributed on hard disks of ca. 300 GB in size." I wouldn't mind at all if someone started slapping the latter tag on complete articles I originally created--heck, I'd put a tag like that on a lot of the articles I care most about. And these type of assessments seem like they can (mostly) be made based on the article alone and not knowledge about the topic. It's when the description of the tag ("missing large sections," "grammatical errors," "could easily be expanded") does not match the article that writers throw fits.

Antandrus also raises a point that's been troubling me more and more. As WP gets more and more complete for the obvious articles, it seems like an ever increasing share of editor time goes to either (1) the creation of articles on recent topics which would not appear in a traditional encyclopedia ("List of minor sit-com characters who have been caught picking their noses in public") or (2) minor edits intended primarily or entirely to enforce policy, guidelines, or standardization. For the actual prose writing, WP seems to be turning into an experts* only project, but the increasing amount of (1) and esp. (2) in WP drives experts away. (*"expert" is broadly defined as "people doing research that goes beyond what a quick Google search finds"). -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 22:49, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

From reading this argument, I agree with what people are saying. The problem with projects like WP:BIO is that they cover so much it's almost pointless having the article covered by WikiProject (it's a bit like being part of WikiProject: Wikipedia - a WikiProject designed to improve all articles within Wikipedia). I mean the whole point of a WikiProject isn't just so we can tag the talk page with a banner and rate the article, but to improve it. And for this we need people with expert knowledge. These editors are more likely to found in more highly specialised WikiProjects like the three we have now: Opera, Composers and Classical Music.

But WP:BIO isn't the only WikiProject that does these flash ratings. Another one I've seen recently is WikiProject Finland which last month tagged and rated all the compositions by Sibelius. Unsurprisingly nearly everything was rated with start or stub (and of course these were 15 second ratings). In fact one of the few B rated article was Sibelius Symphony No. 5 (First movement) - which shouldn't even be an article and should be part of Symphony No. 5 (Sibelius). But because the person rating the article did not know about the guidelines of classical music articles, this probably never occurred to them (and I cannot blame them). This is almost a perfect reason why these ratings are silly.

Which brings me to another issue - if these pages get tagged by WP:BIO, what's going to happen? Is WP:BIO going to positively contribute to the article? Because there really is no reason to tag and rate an article if that's all that's going to happen. Centy – – 00:07, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

The problem with projects like WP:BIO is that they cover so much it's almost pointless having the article covered by WikiProject. Agreed. As you say, the national projects are often way too big anyway (I've edited plenty of French-related articles without ever coming across a member of WPP:France - unless you count their template-adding bot). BIO is like solving this by creating WikiProject:World. It makes no sense. It might have had more reason when WP was just getting started, but not now. Who was it who said all empires die of indigestion? --Folantin 08:06, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

National opera articles again

I've been working on Italian opera and I've just moved my revisions so far from my sandbox to main space. It's by no means perfect and I haven't finished but I thought I'd give others an opportunity to join in. I've made a start on revising the 17th and 18th century sections, using the version on the Italian WP as a basis. I stole Moreschi's section about Gluck and Mozart from the main article. All this probably needs expanding (especially the 18th century - i.e. Handel and Co.). I'm not going to touch the 19th or 20th centuries because I'm no expert on them and I've noticed people round here get upset if an opera gets mischaracterised as "bel canto" or "verismo". Likewise, we probably need a section on how Mussolini's artistic policy affected Malipiero and Dallapiccola (or whatever) and something about the avant-garde (Nono,Berio). But I'll leave that to others.

I've also translated Polish opera. Again, I haven't put the final touches to this but it's a good, solid article which is currently an FA candidate on Polish WP. I've checked some of the facts against English sources and they pass for accuracy. There are some controversial bits (is Halka really a finer opera than The Haunted Manor?) but they can be sorted out. I'm still ironing out a few ambiguities and maybe there needs to be more historical background to make things clearer to the non-Polish reader. --Folantin 12:28, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Well done. I confess to only recognising King Roger of what was mentioned in the article. SO I can't say which work is finer. --Peter cohen 15:33, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

The WP Halka article says "It is considered one of his greatest operas", whereas The Haunted Manor article says "It is considered Moniuszko’s best opera". Jim Samson in Grove is non-commital in the Moniuszko article, but says in The Haunted Manor article that it "has strong claims to be considered Moniuszko's masterpiece". Take your pick! I don't know Halka, but it is apparently something of a totemic work in Poland. --GuillaumeTell 17:48, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Hey, well, I'm sure it will be resolved one way or another even if it means a big scrap between Halkaists and Manorists on the talk page (!). My main aim here was to act as a recruiter for people to fix the Italian opera article. --Folantin 07:54, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Opera Project banner

Now that we are about to ask SatyrTN to run the bot, can we look at the Opera banner and see if it needs editing? The existing text is:

This article is a part of the Opera WikiProject, a collaboration to develop Wikipedia articles on operas and opera terminology, opera composers, librettists and singers, directors and managers, companies and houses, and recordings. The project talk page is a place to discuss issues, identify areas of neglect and exchange ideas. New members are very welcome!

We will also (presumably) need a second version (called operastub?), for noting stubs. Perhaps the wording for this would be something like:

This article is a part of the Opera WikiProject, a collaboration to develop Wikipedia articles on operas and opera terminology, opera composers, librettists and singers, directors and managers, companies and houses, and recordings. The project talk page is a place to discuss issues, identify areas of neglect and exchange ideas. New members are very welcome!

This article has been automatically assessed as Stub-Class by WikiProject Opera because it uses a stub template.

Comments? Suggested new versions? Should we adopt something shorter? -- Kleinzach 03:38, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I would like to chance "This article is a part of..." to "This article falls within the scope of...". This suggestion follows on comments above about the possibility of people who have created articles feeling that their work is being hijacked. --Peter cohen 07:57, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Peter. We don't want to give the impression we are just sticking our flag onto other people's hard work. --Folantin 08:09, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think that wording is standard now. Anything else? -- Kleinzach 08:33, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Good, somebody has already changed it. -- Kleinzach 09:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Done that. Do you reckon the banner should be further altered so as to include an article rating scheme (but not an article importance scheme, which I'm not a fan of). People may have noticed I rejigged Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/Article ranking to make it more opera-specific, improvements upon my improvements welcome. Cheers, Moreschi ^Talk 09:46, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm keen to keep this simple and not confuse anyone. We've just fixed the text for the basic banner and I'm awaiting a reply from SatyrTN about the next stage. It's important that we don't go beyond the established consensus for this operation - at least without starting new topics and explaining what is involved. I'm about to start a new topic myself about another (design) aspect of this. One thing at a time! -- Kleinzach 10:53, 6 June 2007 (UTC)