Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 24

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Proposal(s) to make major changes to WP:WikiProject Council

For whatever reason, this discussion has spawned a long and confusing series of "separate" threads that are really all the same discussion, just punctuated with often unclear and unnecessary headings. I've refactored them into a single thread (with subheadings), so that this mess can be closed (or archive away) all as a single block, when it either resolves or fizzles out. PS: The unrelated "WP Women in Green" thread that was posted into the middle of this mess has been moved to be just above it, so it doesn't get "lost".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:49, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks @SMcCandlish: for merging these multiple discussions into one. Was gonna mention the mess earlier, but you beat me to it :) GoodDay (talk) 22:58, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Participants

Hi everyone. I would like to suggest that we think about creating a list of active participants here. there are a few reasons for this.

1. the whole point of a "council" is to be an actual, active functioning group of individuals.
2. the best way to make this council a real resource is to make it easy to find people who are actually active, involved, and willing to help out.
3. given that some wikiprojects are highly active, some are only slightly active, and some are not active at all, it makes basic sense that this WikiProject Council would be able to point users to the wikiprojects that are most active, including some information on their individual coordinators.

I hope to move ahead with this in the near future. I will keep you posted. feel free to comment. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 05:26, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

ok, moving ahead. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 03:30, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I think that the point of this group is for people who are active in other WikiProjects to have an easy way to talk to other people who are interested in WikiProjects. Think of it more like "active WikiProjects should ask a couple of people to watchlist this" than "we should try to be active here for its own sake".

There's not necessarily much point in sending people to the most active WikiProjects. The biggest handful are easy to spot, but (a) not everyone wants to join a big group and (b) most editors care more about the subject area than the group size. If you're into food, then it doesn't matter if WikiProject Food isn't one of the most active groups; it's still the best place to meet people who are also interested in food. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:13, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

thanks, but sorry, I disagree. there are many possible reasons an editor might want to know which WikiProjects are most active. for one thing, we are here to help people with the process of building WikiProjects, not the process of writing about any particular topic in itself. so therefore, if someone is simply trying to find out how to build a successful WikiProject, one great way to get some information is to look at any existing WikiProject that is highly successful, and well-managed, even those for different subject areas. the point of having a council is to be a central clearinghouse on the topic of WikiProjects themselves, as you know. I appreciate your ideas on this. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 23:25, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Have you looked at Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory? It is periodically updated by a bot with metrics of activity within the associated articles, and on the corresponding WikiProject pages. isaacl (talk) 23:37, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

good point, isaacl, I will take a look there. this talk page is providing some good ideas. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 23:45, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

This is part of what concerns others, I think. If you're making extensive updates without knowing what resources are already present on the page, I strongly suggest working in a sandbox instead of making live updates. isaacl (talk) 23:47, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi there; Radio check

Radio check:

hi there!! is anyone actually here? Please reply, if you are. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 01:41, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Watching --Bamyers99 (talk) 02:49, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Also here. Glad to hear of new life being breathed into WikiProject History. Ambivalent on an explicit participants list. Glad to see you're interested in livening up this page! Ajpolino (talk) 03:15, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Me too, watching. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:40, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

In the last few hours there have been something like 75 changes to the main page. I have concerns about some of these changes, particularly from an accessibility standpoint (leaving blank lines in lists is just one instance): but I don't have time to properly review them all, so am unwatching this page. Sm8900, you may consider yourself to have driven me out. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:33, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Redrose64, I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you will reconsider. i am open to discussing or any or all of the changes. if anyone wishes to discuss, please feel free to let me know. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 19:37, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Another watcher. Been thinking about this Council lately. Jusdafax (talk) 03:32, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

And me.--Ipigott (talk) 10:49, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

thanks for all your replies! Appreciate it. --Sm8900 (talk) 04:09, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Could you please Review „Alem Begic“ ☺️ B.tutundzic (talk) 20:40, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Activity on WikiProject Council

On the list of most active wikiprojects, WP Council does not appear among the first 100. I would be interested to see where it would be placed if the list was presented on the basis of the no bots count. It seems to me that with 708, it would be much higher on the list. Maybe it would be worthwhile relisting them all on this basis.--Ipigott (talk) 10:56, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Ipigott, that query only measured how often a WikiProject's pages got edited three and a half years ago. I don't think anyone cares how often WikiProject Council's pages get edited. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing: Thanks for your explanations. SM's efforts seem at least to be reviving some interest. I was surprised to see the Council project was listed as semi-active. That, for me, is an indication that it is probably not worthwhile investigating further. I can see from recent discussions that in fact there are several dedicated contributors who consider the project is both important and active. As one of the more active members of WikiProject Women in Red, I frequently consult lists of active wikiprojects as a means of seeking collaboration on WiR topics of potential common interest. Until now, I have unfortunately never included Council although I recognize now that on occasion it may have been useful to do so, for example in connection with the revamping of many of the main wikiproject pages to match the Project X format. It simply seems to me that the current method of deciding whether a project is active is not the best way to go about things, especially as bots seem to be responsible for many of the higher ratings. In the case of WP Council, the fact that you get around 120 page views a day is significant - far more than WP Women writers which is considered to be active. Finally, as the query in question is dated, it would at least be useful if it could be rerun to reflect today's situation.--Ipigott (talk) 08:03, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I've asked J-Mo to re-run the query, so you can have current data, and also to rename it, if he can think of something a bit clearer about what it represents. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:23, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Re-writing the page

User:Sm8900, it appears that you are boldly re-writing the group's page. Can you explain what you hope to accomplish?

So far, it appears that you have:

• made relatively minor wording changes,
• created a list of participants (which I blanked, because this group previously decided not to have one),
• hid the decorative headers (why?), and
• added a section Wikipedia:WikiProject Council#WikiProjects information that probably belongs at Wikipedia:WikiProject, if it belongs anywhere. To give some examples of problems with this section's content, it seems that you have misunderstood what the Quarry query is measuring (also, it does not update automatically), and you are emphasizing WikiProjects with formally identified coordinators, which is a very unusual model (even if we were willing to overlook the fact that some of these alleged "active coordinators" haven't edited at all during the last year or longer).

WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:38, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, thanks so much for your helpful questions above. yes, I have been making some revisions. I feel that this page has a lot of potential; it would be worthwhile to revise in order to get this valuable resource restored, and revitalized, in order to start using it as an active forum and resource. I greatly appreciate and admire, the forthright and helpful way that you have opened this up for discussion.

I will be glad to answer your excellent and helpful questions.

• made relatively minor wording changes,
  • Reply: true
• created a list of participants (which I blanked, because this group previously decided not to have one),
  • Reply: I appreciate your note, but I disagree with this. the lack of a list of participants has not promoted activity here; on the contrary, activity has greatly declined. I'm willing to wait on this, and would like to seek some consensus to restore this.
• hid the decorative headers (why?),
  • Reply: the decorative headers were simply impeding active editing of this article; clicking the "edit" link only opened the text of the header template, not the section beneath. I did retain the initial header, though.
• added a section Wikipedia:WikiProject Council#WikiProjects information that probably belongs at Wikipedia:WikiProject, if it belongs anywhere. To give some examples of problems with this section's content, it seems that you have misunderstood what the Quarry query is measuring (also, it does not update automatically), and you are emphasizing WikiProjects with formally identified coordinators, which is a very unusual model (even if we were willing to overlook the fact that some of these alleged "active coordinators" haven't edited at all during the last year or longer).
  • Reply: okay, fair enough, but some of that data is definitely current; other data may not be. I can provide attribution to indicate which ones are current.

my goal is to make this page into an active resource; and also, a functioning body. the name "Council" implies that we do serve some purpose. I'd like to help to make that an active reality.

I appreciate your helpful questions, and would be glad to discuss further. Thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 20:47, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Activity has declined because the need for activity has declined. It took years, but we've settled most of the internecine wars between WikiProjects. "The rules" (e.g., about who decides what's in scope for a group, and what WikiProject advice pages are allowed to do) have been largely accepted.

Lists of participants are an endless ugly maintenance problem for groups that usually have more important things to do. The most valuable editors often don't bother to sign up, but the useless hat-collectors are always keen to get their names posted in as many groups as possible. There is no benefit of making a list to this group, which welcomes people who know how to organize groups, regardless of whether they want to show up for one comment or one decade. To put it another way, if someone needs to make his mark on the front page to feel like he belongs, he's really not the right kind of person for this group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:51, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Section break 1

(feel free to add any comments in this section)

I certainly appreciate the desire to remove cobwebs from a Wikipedia function. My concern is that, as with many WikiProjects, projects overhauled by a single editor tend not to be sustained once that editor's interest/time wanes. Currently, despite the lofty name, the WP Council pages have a minimal role in WikiProject operations. They basically serve only to host a WikiProject guide, task force guide, and the project proposals page. Maintaining a current directory of WikiProjects is a goal, but has become an unsustainably large task to do manually (encouragingly, the Reports bot-maintained automatic directory recently sprung back to life after a brief hiatus, and Bamyers99's list updates automatically). If there is interest in expanding the scope of this page (you mention the page having a lot of potential and of a council that serves some purpose), then I think we should discuss what that role would be. My personal feeling is that for the current narrow scope of this page (basically, as you point out, it's not a "council" in any meaningful way. It's more like Wikipeda:WikiProject WikiProjects) the smaller maintenance-requiring overhead we have, the better.

So I'd prefer we minimize or eliminate lists that need regular updating (e.g. current members, most-active projects, current coordinators). If there's a group of editors interested in expanding the scope of this page and forming an actual council that takes a more active role in WikiProjects, that's fine by me and I have no objection to the expansion of infrastructre to support that group; however, I probably wouldn't have the time/interest to meaningfully participate. Ajpolino (talk) 21:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Ajpolino, I appreciate your reply. just to respond, there is a group of editors, who are wiling to actively update and maintain this page. there absolutely is. that is why we do need an actual list of active participants, right here on this page. we already have some interest in creating such a list, eg from Ipigott, and Bamyers99. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 21:55, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I think "council" is a legacy name and I highly doubt there is any consensus for there to be an organizing group of the type that the word "council" implies. I disagree with making plans to overhaul this WikiProject along those lines without such a consensus in place first. isaacl (talk) 21:58, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

hm okay. I am open to discussion. one note, I do think the existing consensus, based on existing pages, templates, discussions, etc is that this body that is named "council" is actually what its name implies. I don't know of any other basis for naming an object, other than what it is.

Also, I assume you are not opposed to maintaining and updating this page. if the specific updates are desired to be discussed, that seems doable. --Sm8900 (talk) 22:16, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

The actual activity on this talk page belies the idea of a "council" taking on any guiding role in the creation and maintenance of WikiProjects. If you're just trying to make this page into a better resource, I don't have any issues with that, but I do object to trying to bring a council into existence where none actually exists today. I do think you should carefully consider if the changes you introduce are sustainable should your interest wane (as mentioned above). Adding something that needs ongoing maintenance is essentially handing a recurring bill to this WikiProject that someone has to pay.

A few suggestions: rather than making many, many edits to the main page, could you perhaps work on them in a sandbox, and then make an update all at once to the main page? I'm not saying you should only make big bang changes to the main page, as that would probably be disconcerting as well, but minimizing the amount of rework being done live would be helpful. Additionally, could you avoid leaving extraneous blank spaces between list items on this talk page, as this turns into multiple lists which adds extra burden to those using screen readers? (I removed the ones in the immediately preceding comment, as well as changed the list level to indicate that you were replying to my comment, as I believe you were.) Thanks very much. isaacl (talk) 22:30, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

isaacl I think those suggestions are very fair, and very helpful. yes, I'll try to lessen the incremental edits here. that is very fair-minded of you to express in that forthright and constructive manner. thanks!! (and yes, sorry for all the trimming around the edges.) thanks!!

here is a link to a sandbox. I'll try to use it a little more often. thanks. LINK: User:Sm8900/WIkiproject council sandbox --Sm8900 (talk) 22:35, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

You've subsequently made these three edits which to me are good candidates for making in a sandbox, letting you examine them and decide if you seem happy with the results, or even ask others for their opinions, and then making a single batch change to the actual live page. If you do want to collaborate with others on these changes ahead of their going live, then I suggest making the sandbox a subpage of the main page. (You also left a blank line between list items in your last edit, which I have removed.) isaacl (talk) 22:47, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

In the last hour you've made 37 updates. It really would be helpful if you could batch up your changes, and use edit summaries. Even better, get some feedback before submitting. isaacl (talk) 23:02, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

hm yup, makes sense. sorry, just trimming things a bit. I agree with you though, too many incremental adjustments can start to get a bit excessive. I'm going to take a break pretty soon anyway. but you do make some good points. I'm glad to have your ideas here. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 23:08, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

My comments apply to any kind of edits, "trimming", copy editing, re-arranging, or what not. If you can update a common sandbox with batches of changes that have a common theme and ask for feedback, it'll be much easier for other editors to understand what is being done and collaborate. isaacl (talk) 23:14, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

yup, makes sense. I do hear you. will try to keep that in mind. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 23:26, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Found an active Council page!!

Hey guys, some folks are trying to use this page below, to, ya know, I guess propose ideas or something, and try to get feedback. I know, I know, I tried to tell them not to, but you know how these folks can be. lol just kidding!

if you want to help me knock some sense into these intractable folks who insist on actually trying to propose stuff, add your ideas, comments, or input, feel free to join the discussion at the link below. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 23:04, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

It's not necessary to replicate the contents of the proposals page; a link to it suffices. isaacl (talk) 23:11, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

well, it may be not necessary; however, I am not trying to replicate anything. I am providing a list of links to active proposals. the fact that the proposals page does so as well, doesn't reduce the value of occasionally providing a small reminder, imho. again, I'm not replicating the content of a page; I am seeking to promote links to active individual pages, some of which might be of relevance to some specific editors here, if they see a list posted visibly of the current items that are currently available to discuss. I do appreciate your input. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 23:16, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Again it's important to think long term: is it more important to promote the specific proposals at the moment, versus trying to get comments for all proposals going forward? (Also, Ajpolino already mentioned (and linked to) the proposal page above as one of the active areas; it's not a big revelation.) Given the small audience, it might be worth considering moving all the proposal discussion to this talk page, for instance. isaacl (talk) 23:29, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

List of proposals

• Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals
• Current proposals
  • January 2020
    • National Science Policy Network
  • December 2019
    • Taekwondo
    • United States of Indonesia
    • Choral Music
    • Malware and Computer Virus Improvement
  • November 2019
    • Smaller Indian cities
  • September 2019
    • H. P. Lovecraft
  • August 2019
  • Technical standards

Changes to the Proposals page itself

@Sm8900: I'm sorry to be a negative voice here. I appreciate your interest in making positive changes. However, on a particular change you've made to the proposals page, I don't see the value. Over a few edits you changed the beginning of the page from old version to new version. Basically you've added a new request that proposers add their signatures (which as far as I can tell has never been requested before) and moved the old introduction to a section called "Instructions". My opinion (for what it's worth) is that having the proposer's signature on that page is not helpful, and I preferred the older version (i.e. I prefer to read a page with fewer sections and fewer words). Am I missing some aspect of this? Opinions from anyone else would also be helpful. Thank you. Ajpolino (talk) 01:13, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Ajpolino:. No problem, your questions seem fair enough. I appreciate your positive and congenial way of phrasing your questions above. based on your remarks, I have restored the previous section breaks, and the other things you refer to above. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 02:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

We've talked about shutting down the proposals process entirely before, and I'm still slightly inclined in that direction. People don't use it as a resource to find new groups (=its point), and most of what gets proposed shouldn't get started.

Successful WikiProjects – which, in my definition, are a groups that continue to work together for more than a year or two – require the presence of multiple long-time, high-volume editors. The people who are making proposals tend to be relative newbies. I see, from the links here, proposals by editors with 138 edits, 183 edits, 5401 edits, 215 edits, 230 edits (also, he's been blocked by the Checkusers), 4 edits (yup, four), 130K edits, and 4818 edits.

Previous analysis has convinced me that only the groups that involve editors with thousands of prior edits have any chance of surviving, so that means five of these eight proposals are doomed right off. One of the three proposed by relatively experienced editors is, as User:BrownHairedGirl pointed out, a proposal for a WikiProject about fairly narrow subject that has been deleted (so that attempt is probably doomed), and the other two are failing to attract attention. Zero of them have, or are likely to have, the half-dozen solid editors that are needed to sustain a WikiProject. It is so rare that a good proposal is made that I really don't know why we keep that page open. Experienced editors know that it is optional, so they don't need it, and inexperienced editors can't make a viable proposal, so why not shut it down? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:37, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, @WhatamIdoing. I have similar concerns, but prefer the opposite remedy.

In my view, the main issue here is that most of the existing WikiProjects are flagging. The number tagged as inactive or semi-active is a huge under-estimate; the vast majority are blowing tumbleweed. So what en.wp really needs is a massive consolidation of WikiProjects, rather than any more of them. There may very exceptionally be a good case for a new project, that is extremely rare.

I therefore support anything which might slow or divert the creation of new projects. Ideally, I would like to see the Proposals page becoming a compulsory pre-approval process: any project created without that approval should be speedily-deleted. Sadly, I don't think the community is quite ready for that. In May 2018, WP:WikiProject Parenting was kept at MFD, even though it predictably never got off the ground. In Sept 2019, there was only a weak consnensus to delete the absurdly narrow, pointily-created WP:WikiProject H. P. Lovecraft at its MFD.

However, in the meantime, the proposals page does serve a useful purpose, which is hinted at in WhatamIdoing's observation that inexperienced editors can't make a viable proposal. The gain is that they come here to make their non-viable proposal, where it rots ... and that's much better than having them charge straight into creating a new project. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:25, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree that currently the proposals page serves mostly as a void for inexperienced editors to shout into and get the message that there's not broad interest in starting a project on their pet topic. Is it worth keeping a page open for that purpose? I'm not sure. It's valuable in that it cuts down on the formation of ill-fated projects (which as BHG points out are hard to delete, and clutter up directories, making it more challenging for editors to find active projects). But it also feels cynical to keep a page open primarily for that purpose. If we decide to keep it, we should consider doing something to make maintaining that page easier. The current system of new pages and templates for each proposal is a pain to manually curate, and easily falls behind when someone isn't actively maintaining it. Ajpolino (talk) 17:03, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Ajpolino, we could dump the sub-page system and move (back?) to a post-and-archive approach. That's a "bold move" option for the group.

We could also set firmer rules: No proposals unless three editors have previously discussed it elsewhere and all think that it's a good idea (because "user projects" work better when only two or three are involved). If we expected this to be enforced, would require an RFC to demonstrate site-wide consensus.

BrownHairedGirl, have you ever done any WikiProject merges? They're a bit tedious but generally effective. Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces has the usual steps (it's pretty much the same process even when you are just redirecting one, instead of making it a task force). Step #1 ("Get consensus") is the step that people complain about the most, and also the most important. In practice, as long as you post ample warning to both affected groups of people, and nobody in the to-be-merged-away group objects, then anyone can merge defunct WikiProjects up to larger subjects. It just takes time and patience. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:41, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Ajpolino, I disagree that there is anything cynical about encouraging editors to test their idea before going live. On the contrary, I think that we could do with a lot more this "discussion first" approach. I reckon that it's particularly appropriate for WikiProjects, where most proposals don't stand up to scrutiny and where WP:BOLDness leads to a huge mess to clean up.

@WhatamIdoing, I haven't tried project merges, but I'd like to see hundreds of them. However, my main concern at this stage is to stop making the problem worse. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:31, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Agree dead process ....lets mark historical.--Moxy 🍁 06:34, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Restored page

I have restored the page. A discussion should take place before the nature of the page is changed. I personally belive the the recent changes that made this a recruitment page rather than a authoritative page and a jumping off point is detrimental and shows bias towards certain projects that we don't want. Original intro should be restored as the majority will not read beyond it. The most important links have now been regulated to subsections.

Why are we recruiting on this page for specific projects... we should be giving the appearance of arbitrators rather than recruiters. Overall not sure about the huge change that seem to ramble on rather than being precise and direct.

Why are we listening people's names did they agree to be listed here.... do they even participate in the council?--Moxy 🍁 03:22, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate your thoughtful note above. A number of people here have commented here on this talk page, about these changes, and on various aspects of these changes that they felt they wished to address or to discuss. so these changes have actually received input from various editors here. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 03:51, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I really not seeing much support at all for your changes nor a reply to my concerns. So let's start over....pls address. And best. We should also use a stable version. Thank you.--Moxy 🍁 04:05, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

that version was stable. you are the only person reverting it. --Sm8900 (talk) 04:19, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Pls read over the talks above.....all have raised concerns about different aspects of the changes. Some changes were fine...however finding those is hard because we have no indication of what edit was for what change in a flurry of edits. So step by step....why list people who have not put their name here on purpose ( do they wish to represent the council?) and hightlight projects doing well? ...will talk about walls of text and listing redirects after.--Moxy 🍁 04:32, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

again, that version is stable. discussing details is fine. but there is no basis for reverting to a version that reverses all of the recent edits. I appreciate your note above. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 04:58, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Rationale stated above.....trying to move forward. WP:BRDDISCUSS.--Moxy 🍁 05:06, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

reverting edits is moving backward, not forwards. --Sm8900 (talk) 05:07, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

There have been about 150 edits made to this group's page in about 26 hours. That is more edits to that page than were made in the entire previous decade. There is absolutely nothing "stable" about the undiscussed and mostly unwanted edits you've been making. An editor with even your experience level should be embarrassed to make such a claim. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:22, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

• I agree with WhatamIdoing. There are too many fast changes to this page by inexperienced editors. In my view, we need to take a step back and evaluate the broader picture. For starters, a list of "members" does not seem needed, and some of the wording changes need discussion. There is no rush to do this. Jusdafax (talk) 07:01, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Discussion re recent page edits

Section break 1

I was asked to weigh in, so here we go.

1. Thanks to Sm8900 for your eager assistance.

2. The old version of the Proposals page was a lot more concise and precise, with the new version, I get where Sm is trying to go, but I don't know if they are exactly improvements persay. SM's version is a lot cleaner, but it was also a bit wordy, and I had to read through it twice to understand it. Overall, I believe that the new structure is better, but the way it is worded leaves something to be desired. So here's my propossl. If we kept the organization, but improved the wording, I think that page would be greatly improved. (Was this even the issue we were talking about? This whole thing is rather unclear to me, I'm not even a member of the Council.) Anyways, thank you to Sm8900 for your enthusiastic efforts, I and even the people who revert you do appreciate your enthusiasm! Thanks, Puddleglum ^2.0 05:10, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

We are talking about Wikipedia:WikiProject Council not Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals.--Moxy 🍁 06:33, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Puddleglum2.0:, that sounds fine. so below is a link to a draft version of the entire article as I edited it. could you please go to the talk page for that draft, and add your comments as to what wording you would like to see revised? thanks!!!

• Link to draft version of page: User:Sm8900/council draft

thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 05:15, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Sm8900, I appreciate your commitment to stop edit warring on our WikiProject page, but you're not winning friends and influencing people right now. The message I'd like to hear from you would feel more like "I know WikiProjects are groups of people (not 'resources' or 'pages'), and I know I'm still the new guy in this old group. I have some ideas, but I actually don't know much about this group's history, purpose, or shared goals. Is anyone interested in hearing one of my ideas?"

Also, please go read WP:LISTGAP before you edit anything else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:16, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, I appreciate your comment. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 05:17, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Section break 1a

As per @WhatamIdoing:, and others, I know WikiProjects are groups of people (not 'resources' or 'pages'), and I know I'm still the new guy in this old group. I have some ideas, but perhaps I don't know much about this group's history. I feel that I do know a solid amount about the purpose here, and the shared goals, based on my years of experience of editing Wikipedia. Is anyone interested in hearing some of my ideas? I truly appreciate it. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 05:30, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

You claim to know what the purpose and goals of WikiProject Council are. I have my doubts, but there's an easy way around that: Tell me why we exist. What's the point? Feel free to give a few examples. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:55, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

(ec) best read over Wikipedia:Canvassing as well.--Moxy 🍁 05:59, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: ok, fair enough. as the "What do we do?" section currently says explicitly, this page is here to assist editors who might need some help with building a WikiProject, to document some of the successful efforts and practices in current WikiProjects, and to help editors with finding their way to current WikiProjects, i.e. by providing links and a current directory. is that somewhat correct? --Sm8900 (talk) 06:02, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

That's the version that's designed for public consumption. More bluntly, we stop fights between WikiProjects with overlapping scopes, we are (part of) the institutional memory about the who/what/where to ask when WikiProject infrastructure breaks, and we try to reduce the overall maintenance burden by discouraging people from creating pages when they don't actually have a WikiProject (=a group of people) to use those pages. In our "ample free time", we provide advice to people who come here to ask for it, but providing that information "off campus" in discussions such as this and this and this (all old enough that hopefully nobody will be offended at being 'made an example of') is more important than what we say here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:44, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

section break 2a, reply to Moxy

• Reply to comment above. I appreciate your thoughtful points above. I will answer each of your valid points in turn, below.

• why would this project recruit here for just a few other projects or any project?

my assumption is that the people visiting this page for guidance will include some neophytes, who are looking for basic elementary information on the whole area of WikiProjects. one way to enable them hit the ground running is to let them know, firstly, that some WikiProjects that appear to be major may be totally inactive, while others are very active indeed.

So to enable them to navigate through the thicket, this Council can help to serve as a central place where links to some actual WikiProjects that are fully active and shaping Wikipedia are full identified here. in addition, providing resources that can help users to distinguish the active WikiProjects from those that are less active or inactive, might be highly useful to some of the newcomers who might visit this page.

• why list non council members when we don’t even have a list (did they agree to this)?

If you're referring to the list of active participants, the answer is, yes; not only did they agree to this, they posted their names themselves; however, since that only applies to two people, you are probably referring to the list of project coordinators.

the reason for providing such a list of project coordinators is that right now, omitting such a list is not causing more activity; on the contrary, because we don't have any specific data on who is actually involved, anyone coming here is not sure who is available or willing to assist them. by the way, I thought they would get pinged when I used the template {{user|user name}} to list them; however, perhaps that did not ping them, so will change the tag for that list.

that is also why I have the section "radio check" above on this talk page; my goal here is to promote discussion and participation. I am not trying to exclude anyone from this process; quite the contrary, I have been trying to attract as much input and activity from others as possible. On that note, I am glad to hear your views, and to have your valuable input here.

If you're referring to the list of WikiProject coordinators, the answer is that is publicly-posted information. anyone coming here for help might benefit from the knowledge that there are experienced project coordinators who occupy a public role, and are therefore available to answer any questions needed.

• why have long convoluted paragraphs just to link to another page?

I’m not sure which paragraphs you mean. You are welcome to specify any passages that you have in mind, and I will be glad to discuss. However, in general, my reason for adding text to point to other resources was under the assumption that neophytes might come here looking for guidance, so therefore we should provide some words of explanation in offering info and resources to them.

• why list redirect ?

because since, supposedly, we are the Council, one valuable function might be to enable other Council participants, and active WikiProject coordinators, editors, etc, to get some historical sense of the overall shape and nature of WikiProject Council in a historical sense. The redirects provide some insights into how this Council project has evolved and developed over the years. The article redirects are not that old; they’re just a year or two old.

So anyone coming here after a long hiatus might wish to get a sense of what was here before, or what we have now. This is especially true because some folks here might have been involved in developing those older pages.

• why does the "What do we do?" section no longer have what we do?

Actually, if you look closely, the revised version of this section contained all of the same links and resources that it did before. I only changed the text, in order to be easier to read for the average visitor to this page. Also, I don't know that we still do any of the things that section says we do. I'm not sure whether WikiProject Council is still carrying out these functions as a council at all. Most of the WikiProject coordinators whom I've spoken to have little awareness or perception of WP Council functioning as a council, or as an active group.

However, in deference to your important concerns, and valid insights, I have restored the text of that section, as you alluded to above.

• why move main links from lead?

I'm not sure which links I moved from the lead. You are welcome to restore them. In general, perhaps some links were moved simply to streamline the article, and make it more accessible to the general reader.

• why the same links in every section?

is that right? I did? I will try to review the material for this aspect. If I really posted the same links in every section, then yes, perhaps that is a bit redundant. I'll be glad to winnow down any links that are repeated in redundant fashion.

• did copy some facts to our info page

you did indeed. I saw your edit. in all seriousness, that's terrific, and very appreciated! That demonstrates your positive approach to this process and to improving Wikipedia. I appreciate your positivity in doing so. This is what Wikipedia is all about. Your willingness to use my ideas in a positive manner, even during our debate here, demonstrates a real sincere desire to improve Wikipedia. I do appreciate your positive gesture in this manner. thanks.

phew, well, that's a lot of typing, but my goal was truly and sincerely to address your valid points above. I have restored the text of the "What do we do?" section, based on your request above. I hope my replies above are helpful. I look forward to hearing more of your views, and discussing further. I appreciate all your insights here. Thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:53, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

At this point best you ask for an RFC because as of now the project has rejected most of the changes. Pls don't waste our time having to edit war with you. As a participant of the council your supposed to try avoid conflict. I simply see no need to link the same pages in every section or list projects here as we have 2000 of them thus why we have sub pages for them.--Moxy 🍁 17:20, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Recent efforts to improve WP Council

I have been following with interest Sm8900's efforts to make this project more effective. As a result, I have looked into the project's background in some detail and am impressed to see the high number of page views the project's main page constantly receives. This obviously indicates that it has been serving as a useful reference for those interested in embarking on new wikiprojects or perhaps simply wishing to improve those that already exist. I believe one of the reasons Sm felt the project needed to be "revived" was that it is listed as semi-active, a rating apparently based on the number of edits on its talk page. This misleading rating obviously needs attention. I also think it would be useful to enlarge the scope of the project to accommodate more general views and difficulties encountered with wikiprojects. One aspect which could receive attention is the reformatting of the main pages of a number of wikiprojects in line with developments under Project X. Another is the development of more effective coordination and linkage between wikiprojects covering a given area of interest, for example all those relating to women or those to do with history or with science. I hope therefore discussion can continue on constructive developments and that the efforts of Sm and others who have offered assistance will not be completely overruled.--Ipigott (talk) 12:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Ipigott: thanks so much for your helpful remarks above. I quite agree. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:23, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

reply

• Reply to suggestions above.I would like to reply to Ipigott's helpful suggestions above individually , as per the list below.

• I believe one of the reasons Sm felt the project needed to be "revived" was that it is listed as semi-active, a rating apparently based on the number of edits on its talk page. This misleading rating obviously needs attention.

exactly. This WikiProject Council does appears active to some, based its navboxes at many or almost all WikiProjects; however, as you note, it is actually inactive, based on its current designation. Other users may presumably come here, hoping to find this to be an active resource; we should try to do what we can to make it active and useful, based on the input and ideas from everyone here.

• I also think it would be useful to enlarge the scope of the project to accommodate more general views and difficulties encountered with wikiprojects.

One aspect which could receive attention is the reformatting of the main pages of a number of wikiprojects in line with developments under Project X.

I totally agree. One useful aspect of a group labeled "Council" is precisely to hear ideas, proposals, etc, like your idea above, to discuss them here, and then to find ways to get them done, and make them to useful to others, based on input and ideas from everyone here.

In the case of this idea, if we can get some input on your idea for reformatting the pages as per Project X, and get some support and participation for this, then we could look at some ways to make this happen. getting this page up and running as an active resource is a good starting point for this.

• Another is the development of more effective coordination and linkage between wikiprojects covering a given area of interest, for example all those relating to women or those to do with history or with science.

I totally agree. Since we call ourselves a "council," and since in fact that function is explicitly listed as one of our functions, it only makes sense to try to find some methods to promote some greater participation here, and then to work on some ideas to implement your idea above.

In the case of your idea above to group similar WikiProjects and to promote them for people interested in that area, that was one aspect of my providing a list of active WikiProjects in the first place. once take that as a starting point, we can then use that list to group some active WikiProjects by topic, and thus help users to find active WikiProjects in the specific topical areas they might find interesting.

• I hope therefore discussion can continue on constructive developments and that the efforts of Sm and others who have offered assistance will not be completely overruled.

I do agree with you on that, of course. My goal is to provide some useful edits here, and to open them up for discussion, in order to continuously seek ways that others here might like to offer ideas, get their proposals accepted and implemented, or find ways to make this great council into the great active resource that it has always been anticipated to be.

I would like to move ahead with these ideas, and also to continue discussion here, to continue to get some ideas and input on ways to make this better. I appreciate your input and ideas on this.

Well, those are all my thoughts on your great ideas above. I hope that's helpful. I really appreciate your great ideas on that.

Please feel free to reply further, to comment further on the above, or to offer any other ideas, comments, etc, that you may have. Thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 15:29, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

• Just for clarification: my reference to Project X above was because after many key members of that project left, Women in Red together with many other wikiprojects began to experience difficulties. It would have been useful, perhaps, if we had been able to pool our concerns and take a common stand on maintaining the most useful aspects of the Project X approach while abandoning others. It looks to me as if WP Council could have been the right place to discuss these difficulties but we never went further than Project X itself.--Ipigott (talk) 16:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure what is being said above ....when was this project marked semi-active? We do maintain a list of projects in groupings. Perhaps best to participate in the project for some time before suggesting changes. It's great you guys are trying to promote other projects but this is not the place for recruitment of individual projects.....as we cover all of them.--Moxy 🍁 16:55, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I think this is from the mix-up about the Quarry query. It counts how many times a WikiProject's pages (the group's main page, talk page, any subpages) are edited. So if you post a message on your group's talk page like "Let's go fix up Article", and then your group makes a thousand edits to that article, then you're "inactive" and bad. But if you spend a lot of time bickering in the group's talk page, or shuffling around the list of participants, or making lists of articles that you might like to write some day, and never actually improve a single article, then that's "active" and good.

It's a Map–territory relation problem. The metric rewards edit volume in the projectspace, so let's have a high volume here! It is better to do the thing that matters, and find a different metric – one that measures what matters. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory shows activity in pages tagged as being associated with a WikiProject. It's not a great metric for a meta-WikiProject such as this one, but a reasonably good indicator of activity in a topic area for projects related to mainspace content. isaacl (talk) 20:10, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

That counts all edits by anyone, though. "WikiProject WhatamIdoing" could pick out a hundred high-traffic pages, stop editing entirely, and still look like an active project under that metric. I've thought about WikiProject metrics before. So far, I haven't thought of any great ones. A time-to-response metric (which we don't have, and which isn't very easy in MediaWiki) might be my best idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:14, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, as I mentioned it's only an indicator of activity in the topic area. It's particularly tricky as English Wikipedia has matured: the active WikiProjects have resolved their related key issues and there's less need for centralized discussion. Maybe a simpler version of time-to-response would be an average of the time between posts within each section on key talk pages. isaacl (talk) 05:05, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Stop reverting

OK this is out of hand.....stop reverting until people agree to changes. Not a good start to someone who is planing to coordinate any Wiki project.--Moxy 🍁 17:11, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

with respect, your edit was the one that made the revert. I am simply trying to restore the article to its current version, which, includes edits and items made by other editors, not just by myself or my own edits. i.e., your most recent revert removed edits by other individuals that were made today, not just by me; specifically, there were edits today by Izno.

with that said, I am totally willing and glad to discuss your important points about the various aspects of this article. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:22, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Just a note to say that I prefer the old version of the page (though I agree with Sm8900 that the decorative section headers should go, with the exception of the first header). It seems several people who have chimed in above (myself included) are resistant to a piecemeal re-envisioning of this page. I'd echo the advice of others above that if you'd like to boldly re-envision this page, do your piecemeal edits in a sandbox then bring a clear proposal here that we replace the current version with your version. It's clear you're driven by good intentions, but your style of rapid-fire changes makes it hard for myself (and I assume others) to follow, and seems to be rubbing some editors the wrong way. Also this discussion has become incredibly hard to follow. If we could cut down on the new section headers and arbitrary section breaks, I think that might help. Alternatively, if there are specific changes you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to do that in distinct sections. Happy editing all around. Ajpolino (talk) 17:26, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Ajpolino, I appreciate your positive note. as you note, some parts of the old article might be fine, but some of the recent edits did serve a useful purpose for various people here. I appreciate your specificity above about your requests. I have a draft page at my user page now, that I've been using to make edits. based on your comments above, I will try to make all the edits you requested, at my draft page, and then will ping you at that draft page for comment. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:34, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

To increase the sense of collaboration, I strongly suggest to use a sandbox that is a subpage of the WikiProject Council page, rather than a subpage below your user page. isaacl (talk) 17:41, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I strongly urge you to slow down and take into account the advice I have given. Please don't edit the live page any more and instead work on a sandbox that is a subpage of the WikiProject Council page. Working out an agreed upon version is the best way to collaborate, rather than flipflopping the live page between different versions. What someone else does isn't under your scope of control, but you can choose to pursue an approach of gaining agreement on new changes. isaacl (talk) 17:39, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Isaacl:, I agree completely. I will do so completely at once. I have a draft copy set up now at my user page, that I have been using. I will ping you there, if I make any further changes, before revising this page further.

your points above are highly valid. I agree with you, and will proceed the way you request above. I appreciate your help. --Sm8900 (talk) 17:51, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

In order to foster greater collaboration, I strongly suggest you move your draft page to be a subpage of the WikiProject Council page, and to post any requests for feedback on this talk page. Also, can you please stop leaving blank lines between your paragraphs that are prefixed with colons, number signs, or semi-colons, assuming you are using the wikitext editor? This causes additional overhead for those using screen readers. isaacl (talk) 18:09, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

OK let's rstore the page to its decade long version and see what edits are valid to save. We may have to wait as Sm8900 is blocked. I have several problems with the new version...main links removed from the lead...links repeated in every section...listing of non members...listing any project giving the impression of biased in favour of a project on our part.... rewording of the what we do section... listing all the redirects to this page.... basically I objected to changing of the page as being authoritative to recruitment.--Moxy 🍁 18:21, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

hi everyone. okay, I am back now. I truly appreciate the insights and input of everyone involved. yes, i was blocked, but it was reversed by some highly patient admins,once I explained the underlying context, as well as my own prior sincere understandings of this. I also let them know that I unequivocally apologize for over-stepping 3RR in any way. I appreciate the admins who wrote to me, and who took the time to let me know of some highly-useful ways to deal with any such situations in the future. they also gave me links to some of very valuable and and helpful guidelines that provide help with handling such processes here at Wikipedia. I would like to thank everyone here for their input and insights. I would also like to thank Moxy for their thoughtful and interesting comments above, here on this talk page; as I already said, prior to all of this, I do truly appreciate the valid points that Moxy took the time and effort to make, here on this talk page; I have never said otherwise about our discussions here. In addition, Moxy was open-minded enough to let me know that they found some of my edits useful, and had added them elsewhere; as I told Moxy above, I truly appreciate this positive gesture on their part, and see that as an illustration of their sincere desire to improve Wikipedia.

again, I genuinely appreciate the input and insights of everyone here. thanks so much! looking forward to future positive interactions. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 19:54, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

by the way, the prior version has now been reverted back to, by an entirely different editor. I don't agree with the revert, obviously; but I will stick to the talk page for now for any thoughts I may have. as I said, I feel there was some support for some of these changes, while others do need further discussion. I do appreciate the insights here at this talk page. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 20:04, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

14+ years with Wikipedia & I didn't know (until today) that this WikiProject existed. GoodDay (talk) 18:29, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Would love an editor of your calibre to join us. Welcome to the project.--Moxy 🍁 18:47, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Moxy: I'll have to give it some thought. Going by this talkpage, there's a ton of activity all at once. Quite difficult to keep up with. GoodDay (talk) 02:42, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Whoever's adding section breaks here (and at related ANI report)? please stop doing that. It's being done too frequently & should only be applied if a discussion becomes extremely too long. GoodDay (talk) 20:09, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I wasn't aware of this project either until Sm8900 posted a message on the Women in Red talk page a couple of days ago. When I responded, I was hoping to be able to collaborate constructively but unfortunately I have not yet been able to detect any progress. I must say I also sympathize with Sm. I had never had occasion to read the pages cited about reverting and blocking either but then I don't think I have ever had any serious conflicts on Wikipedia and have never "reverted" anything. I have always found the most reasonable way to have things changed back to where they were is to provide explanations on the talk page of the article in question and/or on the talk page of the editor who made what appeared to be an unreasonable change. In almost all cases, this has worked very smoothly. It's a pity the same approach could not be adopted here.--Ipigott (talk) 21:14, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

thanks, Ipigott. I appreciate your helpful comment above. I quite agree. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 22:46, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Moving forward...

Well this has been a bit of a mess. For anyone who tuned out as this discussion got spread over several sections, I believe here's where we're at: This page has been restored to how it was a month ago. Sm8900 would like to propose revitalizing this page, possibly(?) expanding its role. They're drafting a sandbox proposal to replace this page here. If you have comments on that, I'm sure Sm would love help. At some point, that sandbox draft will be brought up here for discussion. During the discussion above, a few editors commented on the proposals page as well, suggesting we find a way to streamline it or abandon it completely. We can continue that discussion here or a few sections above. If folks could stop making new sections and sub-sections unless they have a new topic they wish to discuss, I would be much obliged. Fragmented discussion is challenging for a slow-poke like me to follow. Thanks all for your comments. I'm hopeful that this is the start of a quieter phase of productive discussion. Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 21:03, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

from Ajpolino's comment above: "I'm sure Sm would love help." yup. that is well said. I appreciate, admire and agree with Ajpolino's well-written comment above. I appreciate your input and insights on this. thanks!! And yes, I can set up a sandbox draft, for comment by anyone interested. I appreciate everyone's help on this. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 22:14, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I think more experience is needed before you jump in and change a project that you just found. There is a lack of the basics that is needed in changing and coordinating a Wiki project. It's great you want to help....but a vast knolage of our basuc protocols is essential if you want to help with rewriting or leading a project. Best give it some time then come back when knolage of our goals and protocols are understood.--Moxy 🍁 22:35, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I do hear your point. However, I would disagree somewhat. I think that changes here are open to discussion by all, can be proposed by anyone with knowledge of Wikipedia, and are open to discussion based on the needs of Wikipedia, and what the community of editors here feel would be most helpful to all of them. with that said, I am glad to let discussion here proceed and develop. thanks.--Sm8900 (talk) 22:45, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

At this point the disruption to the project has been substantial and has resulted in a back lash to your proposal and resulted in you being blocked. Best give it some time as project members are a little perturbed right now thus it might be hard to convince anyone. You must be aware that it's always going to be hard to jump in to a project and change its purpose.--Moxy 🍁 22:55, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

I suppose you would like a continuous discussion of this to go on ad inifinitum, where we can continue our byplay. to do so, you would need a response from me. ok, here it is: I appreciate your great comments at the proposed draft that I posted. your comments were useful, on-point and very insightful and helpful. this is what Wikipedia is all about. the ability to get insights and input from experienced editors like yourself is what allows this encyclopedia to grow, to flourish, and to develop here. I appreciate all your work and effort here. thanks.

okay, there. I lobbed one right back at ya. your serve. cheers!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 23:02, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

"I think that changes here are open to discussion by all..." Not really. This isn't about "the page". It's about "the group". There are important humans-work-this-way social dynamics involved. Newbies don't get to tell the long-standing members of *any* social group how they ought to be running the group. I don't want you to imagine that you're proposing a change to a wiki page. I want you to imagine that you've found a group of people who have been hanging out over coffee every morning for years and years. They look like they're doing nothing. Would you sit down in the middle of that group and just announce to them that their group's composition, purpose, and self-description needs to be changed right now? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:59, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

this is not a social group. this is wikipedia. everything here is subject to review and discussion by others. but yes, anyone can come to an existing article and propose changes. which is actually the actual scenario that you are describing. --Sm8900 (talk) 03:46, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

• From Wikipedia:WikiProject: "A WikiProject is a group of contributors who want to work together as a team to improve Wikipedia". (The word group in that sentence even linked to the article about social groups for years.)
• This is a WikiProject.
• Ergo, this is a social group.

This is a really, really, really important thing in our area. People who don't understand social dynamics on Wikipedia tend to accidentally kill their WikiProjects (and then complain to me that all those horrible members didn't follow orders properly). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:42, 16 January 2020 (UTC) please

please cease all references to me personally. you are seemingly trying to engage me in discussion, then rejecting my views when I try to respond. please. by the way, it is not necessary to respond to this message, and please discontinue addressing me personally on this page. this discussion is devolving into a simple war of words. again, I accept all your points, past, present, future, actual and hypothetical. you are free to comment as you see fit. this colloquy has been diverting, but I truly feel we should return to discussing the page itself with the group at large here, rather than an individualized colloquy between the two of us here in this sub-section. this colloquy is not benefiting either one of us. I truly respect and appreciate your understanding. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 07:38, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

This gets right to it: "I think more experience is needed before you jump in and change a project that you just found." See my detailed comments in #Some general background, below. PS: This multi-thread, confused pile of squabbling has already driven off one of the regulars, which is ironic (in the tragic sense, not the silly sense that millennials misuse the word), given that the espoused intent of all this is to "revitalize" WP:COUNCIL (a very iffy idea to begin with, as I detail below).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:38, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Restore old lead?

I see another edit that has again removed all the main sub pages from the lead. .. like our guideline and frequently Asked question page.....as mentioned above this is contentious edit. We like having our FAQ and guidline linked in in the lead as most will not read more then the lead.--Moxy 🍁 23:54, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

The current version is the version from December 14, 2019, a month before any subsequent changes. isaacl (talk) 00:00, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Correct one edit before big changes. ...but it's a point brought up here above a few times. Why would we delegate our FAQ page to s sub section way down the page? If it had been in place perhaps all this would not have happens....as other would have seen what us covers.--Moxy 🍁 00:08, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Sure, you've mentioned it, and as far as I can tell, you made the change on January 15. With the discussion starting from scratch, though, it's probably better not to leave specific cherry-picked changes in place. isaacl (talk) 00:15, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

When one makes sudden changes (such as at this WikiProject) to any area on Wikipedia, which has a lot of interested parties? It's best that one propose those changes on the talkpage & see if it's accepted. Otherwise, one risks peeving a lot of editors, with the results being poor for the proposer. GoodDay (talk) 00:19, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

We link and metion the directory in ever sub section.... we just keep repeating ourselves. Having our main links in the lead will assist people in understanding the project.--Moxy 🍁 00:37, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I made the December 13th edit with the intention of clarifying what the WP Council actually does (this was the previous version which didn't reflect the reality of what happens here), replacing links to obsolete tools, and making the page more clear to navigate. The link to the 2013 Signpost Article that offers WikiProject FAQs isn't really about the WP Council pages, it's about WikiProjects generally. So I moved the link from the opening paragraph to a section called "More on WikiProjects". I'm not convinced that having the FAQ in the intro would've prevented this flurry of activity. The WikiProject guide and task force guide are the second and third links on the page, so I don't think they're buried too far to find. If folks prefer the old version, this would be a good place to say so and we could go back. Cheers. Ajpolino (talk) 00:41, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I was thinking if they had seen the FAQ page they would have realized that project activity was already cover at that page. Think that because the link we not in lead cause them to think it was not already covered.....or the fact we assist projects not recruit for just a few projects....as we are a project ourselves looking for participation. Now that it's way down the page it seems that it's being missed.--Moxy 🍁 00:53, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm less concerned about the "recruiting for a few projects" thing (it's not good, but it's not my topmost worry) and more concerned about promoting the "coordinators" model, because it's wildly inappropriate for most WikiProjects and unnecessary for others. It makes me think of the O'Rourke quotation in Wiktionary. Status and leadership are not the same thing. WikiProjects need more leaders and fewer people with titles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:09, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

For my part, I like this stuff being in the sidebar template, which is close enough to the top and distinct enough that it very well serves the needed navigation purpose. As an aside, however, I really do not like these giant blue bars across the page. They're an eyesore, and a confusing thing to do (they don't match other WP process/project pages).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:35, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Aesthetics aren't my strong suit, so I defer to others on that point. If people want them, we keep them; if people don't, we don't. IMO it is not an urgent issue, i.e., it could be decided next year for all I care. (I can't remember offhand who designed them, which is probably a sign that I need to get some sleep.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

• So thus far we have "old lead" restored - removal of "decorative headers" - moving up of "navbox" - no "members list" - no other project "recruitment" - no "coordinator" list - leave " Ajpolino edits" to subsections stand"?--Moxy 🍁 05:03, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Participants take 2

I know the project says "there is no list of participants, just watch the talk page," and that's cool and all (and it looks lilke it goes back >10 years), but I think the recent issues are strong evidence that is a bad idea (especially since the current version of an archived talk page gives a pretty narrow view of any project: in our case we also now have 27 archived pages to go back and look at to get a complete view). Two (of many) values of listing WikiProject participants are: 1) increasing the social aspect of participation: when you see a fellow participant elsewhere on WikiPedia, you think "cool, they work on the WikiProject council with me too."; and 2) showing how active the project is: if a bunch of very active editors are on the participants list (as would definitely be the case here), it gives the project extra weight (and may give someone pause before they BOLDly make undiscussed changes). Accordingly, I propose we restart a participants page for this project. Thoughts? UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:23, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Seems logical. ..I would put my name. Would also be good that others see that most here have been editing for over a decade --Moxy 🍁 04:01, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

as you know, I agree with this idea. it can only help the project. I agree that it is helpful to enable editors who wish to participate to indicate their involvement to others. --Sm8900 (talk) 04:35, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate why most WikiProjects have participant lists, so if consensus is to have one for this project, so be it. In general, though, participant lists tend to be unrevealing. Lots of people sign up and never participate in any discussions. They're almost never cleaned up—there's often a reluctance to take someone else's name off, and unless someone is very unhappy with a WikiProject, they don't usually remove their own name. So participant lists end up having a lot of members, most of then inactive. isaacl (talk) 04:54, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Ditto Isaccl's comment. Ajpolino (talk) 06:33, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

This teacup-tempest might have been avoided if there was a list of active participants, if a definition for an active participant can be agreed on. Or maybe not.
Is an active participant someone who is active in any Wikiproject? someone who is active anywhere on Wikipedia? someone who has recently posted on this specific project? Measures of activity vary between projects. There is the automated WikiProject X metric, which indicated I was inactive in a project when I had been frequently editing some of its articles, but not the project pages, or the more general manual version, which indicates that anyone on the participant list is active if they are active anywhere on Wikipedia, whether or not the project is even on their watchlist. Are either of these metrics in any way useful? Is there a better one? Can it be measured automatically and updated automatically? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:56, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I think it's a bad idea (for this group). I'd also like to know why User:UnitedStatesian believes that having someone boldly decide to re-write the group's page without discussion is "strong evidence that is a bad idea" to not have a formal (and perpetually incomplete and outdated) list of participants on it.

I think that the evidence, in the form of page views, shows that almost nobody actually looks at those lists. To give an example, WikiProject Medicine's talk page has averaged 150 page views per day over the last three months; the main page has averaged 105; and the participants' list has averaged 5 (just five). If people were looking at those lists to see whether any of their friends were on it, then I think we'd see a lot more than five page views. MILHIST gives similar numbers, except with even fewer for the main page. WP:WIR has a different traffic pattern, but one that is equally weak in membership lists. Their main page averages 1,400 page views per day(!), and their talk page averages 140 page views per day. Their membership list gets 10. That's seven-tenths of one percent of their main page views.

As evidence that nobody cares about them, notice that practically all of them are out of date, and that in many cases, the most active people in the group aren't listed at all.

We also don't have the (actual) use for a participant list, which is to spam people with newsletters and reminders when they forget to pay attention to the group. The participant list is helpful when you're getting a group off the ground and when you want people to keep coming back for more, but this group doesn't need either of those.

In terms of building relationships, I think that what actually works is seeing someone actually participate, not just seeing their name in a list of alleged participants. Then you know that they're actually active, and not just that they signed up years ago and forgot about it, or that they sign up for all the groups they can find. Speaking of which, User:Sm8900, just how many groups do you claim to be part of? I find about 100 WikiProject pages that have your name on it. A single human cannot realistically be part of 100 different social groups. Dunbar's number is a thing, and it limits how many functional relationships you can maintain at any given time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:09, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, with respect, I would appreciate if you could please refrain from any personal comments about me personally here. I will be glad to show you the same courtesy in return. again, please refrain from making any comments about me as an individual, whether positive or negative. again, I will be glad to show you the same courtesy in return. in regards to any questions or comments about the editing process here for any page or article, I will be glad to discuss them in a constructive manner. I greatly appreciate your help and consideration in this regard. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 06:23, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

and by the way, your link labeled "100" actually points to 44 hits, not 100. --Sm8900 (talk) 06:25, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, your manner of re-injecting me into this conversation was hurtful and personally offensive. this is not how Wikipedia is supposed to work. please, please, please, let's all try to observe WP:CIVIL here. our respect for each other, as people, as editors, as writers, is the main ideal that allows Wikipedia to function and to flourish. I would ask that we all exhibit respect for each other, our important efforts, and our ideas here. I am sure that this will enable our efforts to be successful. I do sincerely appreciate and respect your profoundly helpful insights here, in this discussion. thanks very much for your help and understanding. --Sm8900 (talk) 07:23, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

There are two links there, one under the word "about" and the other under the number "100". If memory serves, the first showed 44 hits, and the second showed 72. 44 + 72 = 116, but there may be some overlap, so I have rounded down to "about 100".

I'm sorry that you're feeling picked on. I'm feeling like a guy who doesn't seem to know how WikiProjects actually work is trying to tell the long-time subject-matter experts that he knows a lot more than they do, which is also an uncomfortable situation.

You have been trying to give unsolicited advice to WikiProject Council about how we could be a "better" group. Everything I see suggests that you should not be giving advice about WikiProjects. When I tell you plainly that your advice is bad and that your actions suggest that you don't understand how WikiProjects actually work, you claim that it's not civil for me to openly disagree with you. I'm sorry that we (apparently) have different levels of tolerance for open conflict, but I really do want you to understand this: I believe you need to learn a lot more about WikiProjects before you give advice to any of them. I don't know any way of communicating to you that your skills in this specialized area appear to be lower than your enthusiasm for Wikipedia, and that if you keep this up, you might harm whole groups of people, without just telling you plainly. Yes, I expect that what I'm saying to you hurts. I'm sorry about that. I'm trying to keep you from a world of pain by putting up clear warning signs now. I need you to slow down, to spend a couple of years learning, and to think about groups as actual humans, rather than faceless activities (which you are not doing, even when you copy and paste words like that into your replies). The alternative futures look like either an angry meatball:GoodBye manifesto from you or a community ban at ANI when editors get fed up with you in a couple of years. Slow down, and there's a better chance that we'll both still be here a decade from now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:25, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

thanks! I appreciate your comments to me. I understand that you felt that you had some thoughts that you wished to express to me, and now you have done so. I am glad that you did. a direct note of this type is much better and more constructive. the only thing that I objected to was mentioning my name in passing when it appeared there was no actual constructive topic involved. you have made some interesting thoughts above, and I will give them some thought. I appreciate your help. thanks. Although I may disagree with some parts of your description of my approach to editing, or my actions, I am glad to read your thoughts here. I have read them, and heard them. Now I assume we can conclude any discussion of me personally, and return to the topic of content of articles and pages here. Again, just to clarify, even if I disagree with some details of your description above, I am still glad to hear your feedback and insights above on some things to be aware of. I do truly appreciate your insights here, and will give them some thought. I appreciate your help, and I'm glad you took the time to write. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 19:53, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

This discussion is kinda confusing me. Is it about restoring the lead or starting a WikiProject membership drive. Also, through out this talkpage, indenting of posts seem mixed up. GoodDay (talk) 06:30, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Made it its own section....still have odd breaks added despite concerns raised above and now on various user talks. Last post from me regarding this editor...getting to frustrated.--Moxy 🍁 06:51, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

My take on all this is in a detailed comment in the related thread below this one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:30, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Some general background

In connection with the above discussions, I thought it might be useful to look into WP Council's background and its main contributors. It turns out that two of the project's main contributors, Kirill Lokshin and John Carter, are no longer active. Indeed, the only editors who have been really active recently are WhatamIdoing, who has been contributing since June 2008, and Moxy, who started contributing in October 2010. I also note that Sm8900 first contributed in September 2015. (In this connection, I was surprised to see he was recently referred to as a "newbie" as he has in fact been an active Wikipedian since September 2006.)

Throughout the discussions over the past two or three days, it has appeared to me that the two surviving contributors have sought to maintain the old WP Council page at all costs. As there are only two of them, I think it is quite unreasonable of them to refer to themselves as a "group". I, for one, would welcome far wider participation and am pleased to see how many other editors have begun to show interest in the project. As for me, despite not remembering the project as such, I see I made a number of contributions to WP Council's talk page back in 2015 -- so I'm hardly a newbie either!

I think it would be useful at this point to identify editors who are interested in contributing to making this project more effective. If there really is an argument for not including them on the main project page, then we could perhaps start a subpage of some kind. To untangle all the ideas put forward in the form of (now reverted) edits by Sm8900 and by the others who have been involved in the discussions, I think it would be useful to start a new project talk page, laying out the project's present shortcomings and presenting ideas on how (and which) improvements could be implemented.

I hope these remarks do not appear too critical. WhatamIdoing and Moxy have devoted time and effort to maintaining the project in recent years. As I pointed out earlier, the fact that the main project page gets over 100 page views per day clearly shows it is a really useful reference or starting point for those interested in finding detailed information on wikiprojects. It is to be hoped that any improvements to the project will lead to even wider interest.--Ipigott (talk) 08:41, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate Ipigott's insightful comments above. I greatly agree with your statement. I also appreciate the thoughtful input of others here; even for any of those with whom I may disagree, I have benefited from hearing others' substantive comments here, i.e. for those comments that are positive and constructive, and which relate to relevant and helpful topics that focus on the best editing practices, text formatting, editing and improving this page, or other articles, or improving the discussion process. I appreciate it. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 15:18, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Ipigott, you have cast your net very narrowly. I'd add User:Redrose64 (who has unwatched this page because of the recent activity), User:Harej (who developed WikiProject X, which spun off from this group), User:SMcCandlish, User:Titoxd, User:Slambo, User:Kingboyk, User:Bduke, User:Ajpolino, User:Ceyockey, User:Hyacinth, User:Sj, User:MJL, User:UnitedStatesian, and more to your list. These are people who contribute here, who display participant userboxes, and/or edit the key pages that we maintain, such as WP:WikiProject, WP:WikiProject Council/Proposals and WP:WikiProject Council/Guide. User:Walkerma and the WP:1.0 folks often overlap with this group, as both of us care about inter-project coordination. As I've been saying for several days, this is not a typical group, so pulling the "Top editors" list from a single page really won't tell you everything that the group does. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: [Thank you for the ping] What did I just get pinged to? Why are people suggesting that the Council has members? How is it so many people didn't know about this page and its history? I'm so lost and confused. Also, am I the only one who cares that Topic coordination was removed from WP:PROJGUIDE? –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 22:04, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@MJL: I removed the topic coordination section last October with this edit. I was trying to focus the project guide so it would be easier for folks interested in starting/maintaining WikiProjects to find advice and resources, following a discussion with MarioGom at this talk page. If folks like the old Topic coordination section, we can certainly discuss adding it back to that page or any other page. Ajpolino (talk) 22:26, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

@Ajpolino: I kind of like it as an alternative to creating a WikiProject, so maybe I'll get around to creating an essay or something we can host here. Then we can just tack that on in a see also section. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 23:01, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Well, most of the activity is in the proposals pages, probably, plus some of us have spent a lot of time shepherding the guidelines, like WP:PROJPAGE (and updating the the project indexes). While I agree with the above that an increase in active participants would be useful, I think it's actually a bit wrong-headed to think of this as a wikiproject, per se. It's more of a process page (or set thereof), with some attendant resources, like lists of projects. I agree with isaacl in the thread above this, that lists of participants (often mis-termed lists of members, as if it's a private club) actually have a tendency to cause divisiveness, are not consistently defined/maintained across projects, and are almost always ridiculously outdated. Pretty much the only utility they ever have is in rounding up some people to help out with something topical (and even that can be wrongfully bent to WP:CANVASSING purposes). But the COUNCIL "project" isn't topical anyway, so such a list would not serve such a purpose. If someone needs to draw additional attention to something like a proposal on this page or subpage, try the WP:RFC process, which works just fine everywhere else. My own interest in WP:COUNCIL is primarily shepherding related guideline and other advice, and !voting on proposals; I'm not likely to want to be pinged to every other discussion here, or to get yet another giant wikiproject newsletter on my talk page every month. :-)

Perhaps more to a deeper point, it is perfectly fine for WP:COUNCIL to be much less active today that it was a decade ago. We already have developed the stable guidelines and more technical advice that we need. Wikipedia already has almost all the wikiprojects it needs (most proposals for new ones either generate little interest; or are actively opposed as redundant, unencyclopedic, or otherwise problematic; or at best get semi-support as taskforces/workgroups of extant projects). At least half, and probably much more than half, of existing wikiprojects are either moribund or (worse) have turned into barriers to open collaboration (attempts by small WP:FACTIONs to create walled gardens for WP:OWN and WP:POV purposes) rather than aids to cooperatively building the encyclopedia. Some of the most active and high-participation ones (e.g. WP:MILHIST) have proven to be problematic in multiple ways, though a few legitimately have a boatload of work to do (e.g. WP:TOL which helps manage WP's treatment of the fast-moving target of biological classification of millions of species, and various other highly expertise-heavy ones (medicine, law, maths, etc.) for which there is a daily-ongoing need to "police" content for blatantly wrong (sometimes dangerously wrong) "information" added by cluebags. Aside from exceptions like that, more and more of us realize that actually practical wikiprojects that are not problematic tend to have finite lifespans of serious activity: they actually get the job done of providing a sensible category structure, sample article layouts, infoboxes and other templates, naming conventions, topical notability guides, and other reusable resources for a topical tree. After that, they mostly just get out of the way, providing initial assessment and peer-review "service" upon request (on the way to GA/FA), having low-traffic talk pages that help keep categories of articles consistent and stable (and not, e.g., overrun by spates of promotional articles), and acting as places to round up some topic-specific [alleged-]expert input. The more active they are on their own talk pages after the bulk of the real wikiproject work is done, the more often they are hotbeds of dispute and strife. These are among the reasons that more and more editors every year think the wikiproject system should simply be retired, perhaps in favor of something like topic-specific noticeboards.

So, I'm skeptical of any push to generate a whole bunch of new WP:COUNCIL activity. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. See also WP:WikiProject Stub sorting, another "wikiproject" that is actually a process/resource for internal maintenance purposes. It is (and needs to be) only a tiny fraction as active today as it was ten years ago, because we already have almost all the stub templates and categories we need, and most of the questionable ones have been removed or merged (with the rate of bad new ones been created very low today), while the related guidelines and other resources are already done and long-stable. There's just not much to actually do there, nor any need to "manufacture" busywork. I'm especially suspicious of the above-mentioned motivation to go in a get-WP:COUNCIL-swollen-and-busy direction for "social" reasons; see WP:NOT#FACEBOOK and WP:NOT#FORUM. Two more examples of internal-maint wikiprojects in near-to-total dormancy are WP:WPMOS and WP:ILT, both of which also just basically got the job done, and are either effectively over (in the case of WPMOS; all current MoS-related discussion and development happens at the individual MoS guidelines' talk pages), or in the case of ILT, needing barely any activity besides occasional checking for new inline templates to categorize and code-normalize. COUNCIL is kind of in the same boat; unless someone proposes a new project, there's not a lot to do or talk about here, and that is okay.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:30, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish: Thank you for commenting at length. I am slowly beginning to appreciate the enormous amount of work that has gone into WP Council. I see you have indeed been an active and effective contributor, particularly to several of its more important subpages. I also apologize for my rather simplistic listing above of the main contributors to the project which was based mainly on an analysis of those who had developed and edited the project's main page and its talk page in recent years. I'm glad WhatamIdoing mentioned your name and the names of others who have contributed to the project.

Your comments probably deserve more extensive reactions but, based on my own experience and my involvement in several wikiprojects, I cannot agree that "practical wikiprojects that are not problematic tend to have finite lifespans of serious activity" and "The more active they are on their own talk pages after the bulk of the real wikiproject work is done, the more often they are hotbeds of dispute and strife". I have been an active member of several wikiprojects which have aimed to encourage improved coverage of women's biographies and articles about women and their works. WP Women in Red, now the leading initiative in this connection, was created in 2015 and continues to grow. Discussions on its talk page are extensive and constructive and it is still expanding and attracting new members. Earlier wikiprojects such as Women's History (2011), Women Scientists (2012), Women artists (2013) and Women writers (2014) also continue to be active and effective, as can be seen from the increasing number of articles containing their tags. It also seems to me that WP Military history continues to be a highly effective undertaking. I'm not at all sure that all these would welcome "topic-specific noticeboards" as a alternative, although depending on scoping they might offer interesting potential in their own right.

As for further work on WP Council, I tend to agree that not much more needs to be done but it might be useful to improve the assessment tools currently used as it seems to me that many of those listed as semi-active are still popular and pertinent, judging for example by the continued use of their talk page tags and efforts to improve the quality of their articles up to GA or beyond.--Ipigott (talk) 10:41, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Lots to cover; I'll try to break it up thematically. On WIR and COUNCIL: WIR and its related pages are among the exceptions to the "eventually unhelpful wikiprojects" pattern, for the same reason other exceptions like TIL exist: they still have an overwhelming amount of real and pressing, reader-facing work to do (from the ground up, not just "polishing chrome" on GAs and FAs, which is much of what MILHIST does these days, aside from argue a lot and do a whole lot of decorating and other trivia about titles and medals and flags and which unit was exactly where at what hour, and other stuff that brings to mind WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE policy). The average, more narrowly topical wikiproject does not have much pressing work to do in 2020, versus in 2005. WP:COUNCIL certainly does not, being infrastructural, with the infrastructure already built. It has a light workload, and artificially inflating it by inventing more process for it to wrangle isn't a practical idea. A proposal that is basically going to generate additional process/bureaucracy/rule-creep about something for which we do not need additional red tape will increase editor hostility toward wikiprojects in general (including the best ones), especially since all other internal-focus projects like ILT and STUBSORT and WPMOS have also receded into the background (most of them date to when meta:Eventualism was alive, when WP was trying to become an encyclopedia, while today it's the most used one ever, and is the third to fifth most used website in the world (depending whose metrics you trust). Even FAC (which is basically also a "procedure project") is much less active now than in the past; the per capita ratio of editors with an FA under their belt or trying to get one is at an all-time low. So, when the community sees that such process-projects are no longer essential, across the board, they're not going to buy into turning one back into a hive of activity. Especially not this one. Which brings us to:

On community skepticism of wikiprojects: I've founded and co-founded various projects myself (both content-topical and internal-procedural), so I'm not anti-wikiproject; I just notice trends (including problem trends) with them, and that community skepticism about them has grown, especially over the last ~5 years. Aside from general fear of change, I'm sure many wikiproject booster would not welcome topical noticeboards as an alternative (nor anything else that doesn't smack of being a clubhouse with barriers to entry and bars to continued participation), but the replacement idea will appeal to those with concerns about what wikiprojects have been up to when they're not at their best. Such a transition would most of all be opposed by those who generate those concerns: the dominators of malfunctional projects consisting of half a dozen buddies acting as a wiki-gang (including against other would-be participants in the project). It would erode their factional content-control power by eliminating a bogus "membership" structure (with a sotto voce hazing/winnowing process to preserve the hive mind), and an insular canvassing farm for them to run to when challenged. Even noticeboards might retain some of the latter problem, it they don't have broad enough participation (perhaps through a mechanism like WP:FRS). But noticeboards or some other replacement for wikiprojects is what a growing number of editors who are not wikiproject fans are increasingly likely to eventually support.

On problematic wikiprojects, and the problems: I didn't suggest MILHIST does nothing good; rather, the good it still does these days comes at a high (and rising) cost. It's been my long experience that any time there is a tendentious conflict between a wikiproject and some site-wide guideline or process (with the rest of the editorship following it properly), odds are the cause will be one of these, in descending order of frequency, to the extent these categorizations don't overlap: an entertainment franchise project, a sports/games project, MILHIST, or some other geeky project for a very narrow jargon-heavy subject that is highly credentialist or attracts obsessive fandom. All other projects barely ever register on the disrupt-o-meter (not even politics, religion, and other ideology-related ones, surprisingly). But they're also mostly semi-active at best, like WP:SNOOKER, WP:DOGS, and WP:NEWMEXICO; or are tightly focused on doing really-needed systemic work every day, as are WIR and TIL. There seem to be two diametrically opposite "sweet spots" with a huge, swampy middle ground that's much less productive and collegial than either pole. The middle morass mostly consists of tiresome squabbling, and attempts to game the system to suit the subjective preferences of people who focus near-exclusively on a topic (often professionally or as an all-consuming hobby), versus the needs of the broader readership and editorship. Most of the longest-running and most disruptive "campaigns" of battlegrounding in Wikipedia history (outside areas of real-world strife of the "my ethnicity/religion/nationality/race/politics versus yours" sort that ArbCom locks down via WP:AC/DS and that WP:MFD won't permit "wikiprojects" for if they're PoV-laden) have a firm locus in a wikiproject with a small number of loud and browbeating ringmasters claiming to speak on behalf of everyone who cares about the topic. They wear out and drive off anyone in said project who doesn't tow their party line, and chase away non-"members" from meaningful contribution to articles in the topic, especially toward GA and higher development where only the wikiproject's orthodoxy will be tolerated. I've seen it over and over again. It'll sometimes be enforced by "pet" admins in the faction, who block and topic-ban people who irritate their friends. In one case, several such admins set up their own counter-WP:RM board inside a wikiproject to make out-of-process mass-moves of articles at the behest of other project "members" (for which they could have been desysopped, obviously, though that did not happen; WP:MR and RfC action finally brought that to an end). Another "WTF?" example was a clique of "wikiproject leaders" trying to organize an editing boycott, and also proposing to leave the site to set up a competing encyclopedia, while openly canvassing (including through off-site meatpuppetry) to derail RfCs they didn't like the probable outcome of – all over a spelling quibble (I kid you not, and something similar happened again more recently and repeatedly over another style matter, then descended into off-site harassment of at least two parties, including trying to get one fired from their job). Another was a project "leader" colluding with an offsite organization to push their viewpoint (not well-accepted by other real-world orgs in the same field) to be adopted as a Wikipedia "standard", and who was actually updating the other org's public website on "progress" in forcing such a change at WP (which eventually failed, of course). This sort of stuff is not a new problem. Some of these patterns of tendentious, OWNish, win-at-all-costs, externally-motivated, "rules and consensuses do not apply to our topic unless we like them" factionalism date back 15+ years.

If WP:COUNCIL were to take on something "new and exciting" it should probably be only "How do we fix this before it's too late?" While I'm more vociferous about these issues than average, I'm hardly alone in observing these sort of things and that their connection to wikiprojects is non-incidental and not improving. A whole lot of ArbCom cases and otherwise-unnecessary discretionary sanctions, the codification of WP:CONLEVEL policy and of the WP:PROJPAGE guideline, the creation of WP:RM as a centralized process, and even the rather rapid corruption of the WP:RFC process from "attract people to a discussion for more input" into "set up a voting system with formal closure and treat it almost like legislation and legal precedent", all came about in large part because of wikiproject-engendered, entrenched battlegrounding. At what point does the community decide that the cost–benefit analysis isn't favorable toward wikiprojects continuing to exist? Or, what can be done to change near-endemic flaws in the wikiproject system to prevent such an outcome? To date, "improvement" is generally accidental and in the form of dissolution, to community relief – through wikiprojects with too much time on their hands and territorial designs on their minds going dormant. In only two cases have I seen a viewpoint-conformity and canvassing-farm "wikiproject off the rails" get reformed into a stable, productive (and – no surprise – intermittently active but content-work focused) one. Even these only happened because the original projects fell apart (a dozen or more years after they started) due to one drama festival too many, then were flatline moribund for over a year before being restarted with nearly all-new active participants. In both cases it was basically a replacement from scratch, not a correction. One hopes there's a better way.
PS, re: it might be useful to improve the assessment tools – Yes, no doubt, though probably best as a separate thread! See also the new thread below about upgrading some tabular data. A while back, I identified a couple of assessment classes that were never used by more than a project or two and which were effectively dead, and MfDed/TfDed them, and removed them from in situ use, so at least the assessment ranges are more consistent now.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:53, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate your highly eloquent and insightful comments above. you have provided some truly profound insights on the history of WikiProjects. you have certainly enabled me to learn a lot from the points that you make above. much of what you say is highly significant and very relevant. I am going to try to take some time to really read over and absorb all of the great points that you make above, and really try to learn and increase my knowledge of this area.

however, one small point that I'd like to suggest is that if "WikiProject Council" adopts an approach that states that the main problem with WikiProjects is that they have little reason to exist, and do little but cause disruption, then that would most likely only increase the problem.

the whole point of a WIkiProject Council is to highlight, emphasize and articulate the ways that WIkiProjects play a positive role, not the ways that they don't. the whole point here is that projects like Women in Red, do play a positive role. Ipigott's statement make clear how much an active WIkiProject can play a positive role, with a group of dedicated editors. I realize that is not the majority of the WIkiProjects, but that's the whole point; we should find ways to promote the ways that WikiProjects can be positive; not the ways that they can't.

yes, we can openly acknowledge the problems that exist in WikiProjects; but it should be clear that we are doing so in order to highlight how much some WIkiProjects do play an active role, and how much we can encourage other WIkiProject to adopt methods that can enable them to also succeed in playing a positive role.

Again, none of this is to detract from your profoundly insightful and knowledgable points above. I am simply saying we should utilize our past experience and data to find ways that we can all help to improve WikiProjects, not to say that WikiProjects themselves are the reason these problems exist. I do appreciate your insights. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 01:17, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Ya'll do as you wish. Way too much to read, to figure out what's being discussed about this WikiProject. GoodDay (talk) 03:11, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Omaha

I've asked if WikiProject Omaha should be converted into a task force of WikiProject Nebraska at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Omaha. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 20:50, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Louisville

I've asked if WikiProject Louisville should be converted into a task force of WikiProject Kentucky at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Louisville. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 20:51, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi Another Believer. that is very good to know. I appreciate your efforts on that area, and your updates to us here. could you please keep us posted? thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 18:33, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Quality log reporting bot

I have attempted to improve the functionality of the page pages of WP:HOU by installing the quality log reporting bot. Please bear with me if am not proficient in tech-language. I scraped the code from the WP Texas assessment page, pasted it into my sandbox page, and changed the target. It appeared to be working: only Houston articles were being reported. I created a new page for the reports and pasted the code into that file. I attempted to further test it by creating new events: I changed the status of some articles in two ways. First, I added Henry Howell Williams to WP HOU. Second, I assessed some unassessed articles and reassessed others. All of these events should have appeared on the quality log, but none of them did. Does this bot need to be customized for each project, or do the data objects need to be restructured, and how would I obtain help for this? Thanks, Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 22:21, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Resolved

In case you ever need help with that: assessment work belongs to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, and User:Walkerma is my favorite contact there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:22, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject activity

I think there may be disagreement about how to define a WikiProject's status as active/semi-active/inactive. Is there even a consensus for what constitutes a WikiProject activity. I propose the following as WikiProject activities:

• Assessment of articles within the project's scope
• Establishing or redefining project objectives
• Coordinating the expansion and improvement of some articles according to an established project objective
• Coordinating the maintenance of GAs and FAs within the project's scope
• Peer reviews
• Greeting users who have signed up as project members
• Culling the member list
• Employing and maintaining WikiProject reporting tools
• Assisting editors who are working within the project's scope, regardless of whether they are project members
• Monitoring and responding to inquiries on the project's talk page
• Monitoring the new articles feed for content within the project's scope

Any thoughts? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 16:00, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

"Assessment of articles within the project's scope" is something I've done a lot of, and after hundreds (and hundreds and hundreds) of hours doing this for thousand (and thousands and thousands) of articles, you'd think I would think it was important. However:

1. Dead WikiProjects frequently have no/few unassessed articles, because nobody tags articles with them.
2. Highly active WikiProjects frequently have dozens/hundreds of unassessed articles, because everyone tags articles with them.
3. People who update ratings usually update ratings for all WikiProjects at once, so completely dead groups look like they're changing their ratings.
4. Much of this (especially labeling stubs and statuses like redirects) can be done by bot these days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Excellent start; I would add:

• (Relevant to new WikiProjects): completing Project "setup" activities such as creating project templates and categories (surprising how many projects have not done this)
• Maintaining the portal associated with the subject (if there is one).
• Monitoring the results of deletion sorting for the project.
• Developing and maintaining the categories and templates that relate to the subject.
• If appropriate, developing guidelines for the structure and style for articles within the project scope
• Providing links to external data/archives/publications that can be used as sources for articles within the project.

And to @WhatamIdoing:'s comment on assessments, I would note that the talkpage banners for inactive/defunct wikiprojects should be set to suppress assessments (most such templates are).

Thanks, UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:07, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Requiring a group

Most of us can quote it: "A WikiProject is a group of people that wants to work together."

But some of the (mostly newer) folks proposing groups don't know it, or they don't quite believe it. Over at User talk:Sm8900/item draft 2#Be aware of similar efforts, User:Bluerasberry suggests five as a minimum number for a viable group. I've said before that sustainable groups need half a dozen editors to survive the first year, based on some preliminary head-counting I did in the past. I believe that we've arrived at our estimates independently.

First (most important) question: Does anyone think we're wrong? Can anyone think of a thriving WikiProject with just two or three people in it?

Second (contingent) question: If (and only if) our estimates are correct, do you think that the community should (for the first time ever) require people to produce a minimum number (perhaps four/five/six?) of named participants to start a new WikiProject? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

I think it's hard to consider what two or three people agree upon to be a meaningful consensus, and discussion in that case ought to go further up the hierarchy to a large group of potentially interested editors. Specifying a minimum number would help reinforce the message that is already currently given: make sure there are enough interested editors willing to engage in prolonged discussion so that a separate talk page is warranted. That being said, although it may help with the most obscure subjects, I think for most topics, the head count is easily padded with editors who'll express an interest, and maybe show up occasionally, but not truly engage with the project. (Almost all projects start with a huge surfeit of initial signups that never edit the project pages again, after all.) isaacl (talk) 18:08, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

To your two questions: (1) I think you're right. If 2 or 3 people want to coordinate, they should use their userspace instead of project space. (2) I'm not sure. I tend to think not, as I'd like to avoid creating extra bureaucracy here if at all possible. Inactive WikiProjects really aren't that problematic, they just sit quietly not bothering anybody. The only downside is the theoretical risk that empty projects draw new editors who, upon finding the project pages abandoned, either leave the site entirely or aren't as productive here as they could've been. The extent to which this happens is probably not measurable, so I'm not sure how extreme of measures we should take to avoid it. I do think we should feel more free to userify or defunct-ify single-editor projects that have gone inactive though. I'd prefer we shut down projects that never got off the ground, rather than prevent those projects from trying. Ajpolino (talk) 20:11, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

What constitutes "just two or three people in it"? A project that currently has two or three members actively building the topic? A project that has only two or three signed up members who are currently active on Wikipedia in any way? Something else? Members who only have project topics on their watchlists are of value for maintenance, even when they are no longer creating or building articles, but it can be a lonely place to be the only one working on the overall scope of a project most of the time. Do such projects thrive? I would say as long as there is one person dedicated to the expansion of the content within the scope of the project it is viable. When that person stops actively building, someone else may take over, or the original may come back and pick up where they left off. As long as there is useful information in the project pages, the project could revive, and the project pages provide history and continuity. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:39, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Pbsouthwood--Sm8900 (talk) 06:41, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

To expand on my previous comment: I am listed as a member of several projects, because they cover topics I am sufficiently interested in to occasionally or potentially create a new article within their scope. I usually sign up because I have just made some significant edits in a tagged article, or have just created an article which I tagged as obviously within scope of a project. In many cases I have no idea how often I will edit on similar topics, but consider it highly likely that I will do so some time. Most of the projects are not very active by the edit counts on the project pages, but that has no obvious correlation to what is going on on actual articles tagged for the project. I would consider myself very active in WP:WikiProject Underwater diving, moderately active in WP:OSH, and occasionally active in the rest, often incidentally as a side effect of another project. For example I have edited many medical, physiology, physics, technology, occupational safety, nautical and education articles which are also within the scope of WP:SCUBA. I use the project pages of WP:SCUBA to plan the structure of the coverage of that project, and the others to occasionally notify the projects of something that they may find interesting or ask a question. Sometimes I get an answer. Mostly I am out in mainspace editing. I am here to build an encyclopedia mainly by adding content and making that content findable. I like to collaborate, but do not need to be part of a coordinated group. Sometimes I do gnomery like adding short descriptions, for which I think I actually started the project WP:WikiProject Short descriptions which is fairly active, when I see damage I fix it, if someone asks for help I see what I can do, and when I see governance issues I observe and when I think I have something relevant to say, I say it. I have no idea how common this scope of activity actually is. I find WikiProjects are useful tools, even when not very active, but sometimes they tend to lose the plot a bit and become little empires. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:45, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Also, what is out metric for "thriving"? Sorry to be so pedantic, but communication on Wikipedia often fails because people interpret things differently, and sometimes will not recognise when this is happening. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:51, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

If a group of one editor produced a consistent improvement in a topic and recorded their plans and activity relating to that topic over a reasonably long period in the format of a WikiProject, would there be cause to object? Should it make a difference if this is how the project starts, or what happens to it after a long period of activity or inactivity? I am assuming that the hardware and data overhead is trivial. Obviously this can be done in user space, but then it is less likely to attract other interested parties, and to a group of one, a single additional member is a big deal. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:11, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

In reply to WhatamIdoing's initial query, while almost all Wikiprojects are dead or dying, there are certainly some with only a handful of regular participants that are still reasonably active; the WT:WikiProject UK Railways model, where there isn't much actual collaboration as such but where the project talk page still serves as a place for casual editors to ask questions which the handful of regulars try to answer, still serves a useful purpose. There are others like the horses project where to judge by the talk page you'd think there were no active members, but are actually still quite active and it's just that by now all the participants have each other's talk page watched so the discussions take place on user talk or article talk pages. Going back further, we once had one WikiProject (now deleted, but its talk archives survive) which was set up with the express purpose of being restricted to its three founding members. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Peter Southwood, "a group of one person" does not sound like a group of people.

I'm not thinking of this as a retroactive rule. I'm thinking of it as a way to stop creating more failures.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject UK Railways says that group has 17 people who have made multiple edits to the group's talk page during the last 90 days. Some of them may be non-members who had questions, but that's still a substantial group of people. Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Equine names four people active on the talk page. There are 40 registered editors who have edited articles tagged by that project (including three of the four participants on the group's talk page). This does not strike me as strong evidence of "a group of people that wants to work together". A few, yes, and no need to bother them. But if they asked today, I don't think that I'd recommend that they bother spending hours (and hours) setting up all the infrastructure. Just watchlisting each others' user talk pages would probably be more efficient for a group of two or three people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:04, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I guess it comes down to how you define a group. After some thought and research I chose to consider a group to exist if it contanes a minimum of 1 member. Other definitions exist depending on context, for example a peer group requires a minimum of three members. When referring to an unknown or variable number it is common practice to use the plural as a generic, it is less verbose than the more precise one or more (people), or none, one or more or at least two (people), or any of the many other options.

To avoid failutes, it may help if we define failure for the purpose of the discussion. (if it has already been defined, a link will do). My first impression would be that it is a result less useful in the long run than having done nothing, but that brings up the question of how long the run must be before making the assessment.

Predictions can be difficult, particularly about the future. Sometimes the only way of finding out is to do it. History is written by the survivors.

There are still a couple of unanswered questions above.

• What constitutes "just two or three people in it"? and
• Also, what is out metric for "thriving"?

I need this to answer the original questions. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:56, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

As someone who is pretty much the only active member of a task force (WP:BATS), I don't really see what the harm is. Occassionally other editors cycle in and out of the project space, but it is largely me. Even though there aren't many editors collaborating with me, there are sustained results to the topic area. I think it's fine to encourage editors to have a certain amount of engagement to create a new project, but I'm not sure it should be required. Enwebb (talk) 20:32, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I think the only "harm" that I can see coming from a mal-formed new WikiProject would be through that project starting to place project templates onto article talk pages which, through a failure of that new project to maintain momentum, ends up leaving a trail of an incomplete set of pointlessly templated pages, which someone else will either have to continue or rollback. Having just looked at the admittedly somewhat moribund WP:BATS Wikiproject, I can see two wonderful things there, and I have no need to care whether or not one person or one hundred are actively editing: Firstly, it has a Hot Articles feed, showing me what's currently being edited within that Project's theme (be it improved or vandalised!) and, secondly, the incredibly useful Quality Assessment table. The latter might well give some lonely, flitting chiropterist or wikignome an opportunity to find articles to improve or reassess, without ever needing to joining the project, or even announce their presence there at all. Other than that, the only harm would be through misleading a few people into believing there is, or was, an active wikiproject on that topic, when there never actually had been one.  That said, we've seen what happens when one misguided person rises to the challenge of enlivening Portals, only to go too far and create a myriad of pointless, trivial such portals. Their enthusiasm then causes a near-vendetta against all portals by a handful of other equally committed individuals. I would hate to see their destructive efforts, tirades and walls of intolerant text being directed towards WikiProjects on the same grounds. So, it would therefore seem prudent to require some evidence of a (quite low) minimum number of committed editors willing to support a new WikiProject before that Project were 'approved' and set running. Nick Moyes (talk) 00:45, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Nick Moyes, do we have any idea how frequently new projects are created? That would lend some credence to the thought that "this is a problem that needs to be addressed"--if we had numbers of how many projects have been created in the last year, how many editors they started with, and how many "failed" within a certain time period.

As an aside, I'm curious as to how you're defining moribound in relation to WP:BATS. There aren't many editors, there never have been, but the number of GAs has more than doubled since the project started and has had a net decrease of more than 200 stubs, going from ~75% stubs to <50%. Enwebb (talk) 01:55, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@Enwebb: I have no data at all, sadly, though I doubt very few new WikiProjects have been createdly recently. I, too, would be interested to know. As for defining 'moribund' I meant no insult to your project or your own activity - it was based solely on your own remark that you are the only contributor. I believe I read a rationale somewhere that said it was ok to mark a W/P as inactive if there had been no talk page activity, bar automated posts, for a year. But I think that's a very poor metric to use. At WP:ALPS we have very little TP actvity, yet individuals are still working on relevant articles. Nick Moyes (talk) 02:14, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Nick Moyes. All WikiProjects have some value, if they were set up to address a core topic of some importance. we can rework some, if that helps to foster greater interest or activity, but a mere decline in the number of editors does not mean the whole WikiProject is invalid. --Sm8900 (talk) 02:19, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Edits on the project pages are a poor metric of anything except development of the project pages.

I would not like to put obstructions in the way of a person who has already created and developed a substantial number of articles in a topic worthy of a project from creating a project for the topic in the hope of getting more contributors, or even just keeping track and planning further development. One dedicated editor can produce more quality content on a topic that a moderate size group of occasional dilettantes.

We do not need another portal fiasco. Some checks and balances are desirable. Not sure what they should be though - One energetic and skilled person can produce more quality content than a much larger number of less productive editors. Maybe the criterion for project creation should be linked to combined content creation history of the proponents, with some specific reference to work in the proposed topic area, rather than a number of people who claim interest? Then there is the matter of maintenance projects. Some work just needs to be done, and a prolect is a good way of coordinating it. I started WikiProject:Short descriptions because it was useful and I considered it necessary. I did not wait around to find a group. It seems to have helped get a lot of work done, though we are still some way from reaching the primary goal. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:37, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Great question WAID - discussions with Sm8900 brought me here by the way. I don't think WPs need an enforced minimum number of active editors (which also requires some definition of activity, and potentially in what scope, etc., which is needlessly bureaucratic). However such a statement is helpful as general guidance to help editors understand what a WP is about, which is a central venue to discuss topics - which means it's not going to be successful on one's lonesome. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:49, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

To expand on my previous comment: by all means, if you want to work on anything, you should proceed, whether or not you've made a group to work on it. If this means making some pages in Wikipedia space in order to lay out the work, great! If it's just you so far, though, rather than take on the extra overhead of creating a new WikiProject page and then recruiting specifically for that project, I think you'd be better off finding a home in an existing WikiProject, and looking for other editors with similar interests there. Some editors seem to think that if they create a WikiProject, participants will come, but I believe the reverse is far more common: find enough interested editors, and the need for a new WikiProject will emerge.

As discussed in another thread, WikiProject activity is difficult to measure. WhatamIdoing suggested a possible metric might be responsiveness to questions on the WikiProject talk page. I do think projects can do a lot of useful work establishing consensus on various issues, and then mostly be in maintenance mode, where there won't be a lot of activity on the project talk page. But when there is something to discuss, there should be enough people offering up a reasonably diverse set of viewpoints in order to have a broad discussion. If it's just an occasional person posting with no responses, eventually they'll get tired of posting, and the WikiProject will no longer serve as a central discussion point for editors interested in that area. isaacl (talk) 18:26, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Couple of points:

• Yes, let's avoid the Portals fiasco. What constitutes a topic of "importance" is always going to be debated.
• Setting up WikiProject pages is not always valuable. In addition to slightly increasing the maintenance burden on the rest of us, it can often by harmful to the very editors who are trying to start the group. They often leave Wikipedia soon after creating the WikiProject pages.
• Peter, if a WikiProject is a group of people that wants to work together, then it can't be a "group" of one person. You can't "work together by yourself".
• I asked for an example of a "thriving" group that was small, because if it's a good idea to have small groups, given that we have so many (a few thousand) WikiProjects, there ought to exist an example of a group with just a couple of editors that was worth the hassle of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure.
• I won't speak for the metrics used by anyone else, but when I looked into it, I was looking at the number of people who said they would participate during the proposal, compared to whether anyone at all (whether in that group or not) was replying to comments or questions left on the group's talk page. "Failure" meant zero replies. Most WikiProjects failed within a year. Many failed within a couple of months. Inexperienced proposers of failed groups had usually stopped editing entirely a year later. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:06, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Major change to History project

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject History/History Town Hall. I noticed before but didn't realize to what extent till now because of this nomination....the history project has been overwhelmed by what seems to be a brand new editor despite them being here for a decade. Perhaps a review of what has happened to the project overall is warranted. This editor is all over the map with things of this nature.--Moxy 🍁 06:09, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

well, I don't know if I am a new editor, but yes, anyone is welcome to come by and to add any comments or input. and also, if you are editing any area or topics within history right now, it would be great to hear from you. Please feel free to let us know about any projects or activities of interest that you may have, or else please feel free to let us know simply what your interests might be. History is an art form, and Wikipedia is the canvas for multiple ideas and interests, of every type. So please feel free to visit the page any time. We appreciate the input and ideas of everyone here. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 11:25, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

by the way, if anyone here is editing ancient history, we would like to hear from you. there seem to be a lot of knowledgable editors in this area, who have greatly expanded this vitally-important area of Wikipedia historical topics. I am highly interested in this area, but I don't have any particular expertise in it. so I have not edited this area very much at all. if any editors who are active in this area wish to point others towards their efforts, that would be most welcome. we would appreciate any insights or input on this. thanks!!! --Sm8900 (talk) 11:28, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Suggested update

WhatamIdoing has kindly let us know on the Women in Red talk page that WikiProjects by number of changes to all its pages has recently been updated. Even though the new version contains identical figures in the "count" and "no bots count" column, I think it would be useful to substitute it for Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProjects by changes (dated 11 July 2016) which is linked from Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory under "Lists and reports".--Ipigott (talk) 11:20, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Resolved

 – in this diff undo using a local (enwiki, not meta) Quarry interwiki. –84.46.53.188 (talk) 00:43, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Please review

Am I seeing this right? Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History#Request help with new Council for WikiProjects.--Moxy 🍁 05:44, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Laddy. I lost track of what that fellow's doing & where he's going with it, some time ago. GoodDay (talk) 16:26, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

My observations are being proven accurate. GoodDay (talk) 21:59, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

JFTR, archived by the proponent. –84.46.53.188 (talk) 03:09, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Women in Green

Thanks to considerable support, WikiProject Women in Green which has been a task force of WikiProject Women is now a wikiproject in its own right. Anyone interested in upgrading articles about women to GA status or higher is welcome to participate in the project.--Ipigott (talk) 11:40, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

€ 0.02 from the IPs: This can be confusing for outsiders (example), so if there are absolutely no reasons whatsoever to do something else it would be nice to have WIG + WIR as daughter projects of women, with the latter mostly on auto-pilot to collect article alerts created by bots etc., WIG for anything better than stub, and WIR for anything worse than start. –84.46.53.188 (talk) 03:22, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Q6 review

Please check that I got Q6 right on WT:WikiProject Internet culture#Project YouTube + WT:WikiProject YouTube#Closing shop? Notably, does that bot exist? Assuming too much instead of good old MASM assume:nothing is one of my weak spots. –84.46.53.188 (talk) 04:31, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

You've asked, so the first part is okay. Now you wait a couple more weeks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:10, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Newspapers

I have tried to revive the Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers by updating the content, instructions and monitoring the unassessed articles. There are now alerts and popular articles for this project. It has been broadened to include all newspapers, worldwide. It should be listed on this page below the Media project.

G. Moore 17:28, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

User:G. Moore, your next step is to make wiki-friends with editors who are interested in that area. Look at WP:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Newspapers and leave friendly notes asking them to put the page on their watchlists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

G. Moore, See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Recruiting editors

Bots no longer calculating WikiWork and Relative WikiWork

The bots have stopped updating the WikiWork and Relative Wikiwork. User:WP 1.0 bot/WikiWork/all stopped updating in June 2019. So even though the assessment tables for a project are up-to-date on the distribution of classes, the statistics at the bottom are very old (I've been manually calculating them). I'm not even sure who to tell about this. Thoughts? Enwebb (talk) 03:14, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@Kelson: and @Audiodude: operators of the bot.--Moxy 🍁 03:32, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Are these missing stats useful? Who uses them and for what? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:09, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, I use them! I keep track of trends in article quality. I got the idea from WikiProject US Roads. It is also useful to compare related WikiProjects, like here with the side table. Enwebb (talk) 13:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Enwebb, I like this. I will have a look and see if I can work out how to do it for WPSCUBA. Not sure how useful it is, but coolness factor is fairly high. Brings out ny inner geek. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:02, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

@DatGuy: Actually it looks like that WikiWork table was updated by User:DatBot. I don't think it was ever done by User:WP_1.0_bot which is the bot we operate. audiodude (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@Kelson and Audiodude: User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Roads-1 and User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Canada-Roads-1 have also not been updated since August. Please fix them? Imzadi 1979 → 22:58, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

August was when we shut down the automated table creation from the old version of the WP1.0 bot. Unfortunately, so-called "custom" tables did not get migrated in the first pass. We would need to work together @Imzadi1979: to figure out how these operated and incorporate them in the new bot. audiodude (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

See the corresponding issue on the WP1.0 bot github source code page. audiodude (talk) 22:16, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@Audiodude: for the two tables I mentioned, it shouldn't be that hard. Looking at the second table for Canada, there are 15 rows, one each for each province/territory plus one for the TCH task force and one for the overall project. Looking at the first row specifically, it links to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Alberta road transport articles by quality statistics and then pulls the total articles for each assessment class (FA, A, GA, B, C, Start, Stub). The last three columns are the total articles and the two WikiWork factors (cumulative, relative). Each province/territory has a separate assessment categories. The other table is basically the same for the US; it just has more rows because we have more states and territories, plus some other task forces by topic. Each has its own assessment categories.

(Long ago, I had requested some other similar tables for other road projects, so if we can get one of these built, it should be an easy matter to recycle the code.) Imzadi 1979 → 23:21, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@Enwebb and Audiodude: See User:DatBot/WikiWork/all and the related pages. Do the results seem accurate? I made a few improvements. Dat Guy^Talk_Contribs 11:00, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

DatGuy, the relative WikiWork values seem too low. I just manually calculated the WikiWork and relative WikiWork for WP:MAMMALS and got ω = 45019

Ω = 5.29, compared to 34240 and 4.02 for Datbot. What changes did you make? If it's from removing "A-class" then that's probably fine--most projects don't use that except MILHIST and a few others. Enwebb (talk) 13:10, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

@Enwebb: should be fixed, I'm running it entirely again to make sure. Dat Guy^Talk_Contribs 13:50, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

DatGuy, that looks right! Thank you! Enwebb (talk) 14:54, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Dead toolserver link

Hey team, as many of you know the link that is at the bottom of many WikiProjects, that begins with [[tools:~dispenser/cgi-bin/transcluded_changes.py, has been dead for quite some time. Any objection to my reaching out to a bot operator to begin automated removal of the busted link from every project where it appears? If it ever magically comes back to life, we can have the same bot put it back. Let me know, and thanks, UnitedStatesian (talk) 02:46, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry just to clarify, is that the tool that used to be the "project watchlist" that showed all changes to project-tagged pages? I thought there was a replacement tool, but maybe I was just thinking of the "tool" described here which requires a bot to maintain a list of tagged pages. Anyone know of a better way to get a similar result? If not, I'm happy just having a bot pull the links. Like you said, if the tool comes back we can mass-readd them. Thanks! Ajpolino (talk) 04:05, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'm referring to the external tool described as "Project Watchlist" and located on toolserver; that's the one that is busted. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:25, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

There seem to be several options. User:Kaldari supplies Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Hot articles, which is enough for editors who want to see what's active. You can use Special:RecentChangesLinked if you want everything, or you can divide up "everything" into multiple lists (WPMED example). There's Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions, which does something similar with tagged talk pages. Other people might be more interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Tools#Article Alerts than a watchlist per se. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:02, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject COVID-19

I've created WikiProject COVID-19 as a temporary or permanent WikiProject and invite editors to use this space for discussing ways to improve coverage of the ongoing 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic. Please bring your ideas to the project/talk page. Stay safe, --Another Believer _(Talk) 17:24, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Update recommendation for WPBannerMeta

Today Template:WPBannerMeta uses {{Category TOC}}. I recently created the required category pages to support article assessment. Then I saw another editor updating all those pages with {{CatAutoTOC}} because of the number of pages in each category. The system and instructions should be updated for the, perhaps newer, template. I explored the update in WPBannerMeta's supporting sub template—see the diff link that follows. I am not familiar enough with the system yet to know what the right 'fix' is and where it might need to be updated. See the diff. —¿philoserf? (talk) 22:44, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Another editor has updated the template. —¿philoserf? (talk) 22:37, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal

On 29 January, I posted an inquiry at the talk pages of the various subprojects of WikiProject Texas in order to gauge interest in these WikiProjects. So far I found only one other editor to indicate that they intend to help coordinate WikiProject Texas or any of its subprojects. As a result, there is no other choice than to convert all of the subprojects into Task Forces in order to reduce the administrative responsibility. These subprojects include: WP:ATX, WP:DFW, WP:HOU, WP:TAMU, WP:Texas Tech, WP:UH, Wikipedia:WikiProject University of North Texas, and Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Texas at Austin. For the sake of simplicity, I suggest that all of the university projects convert to direct children of WP Texas, such that WP Texas will be the direct parent of all of these subprojects and will result in a two-level structure.

Below I have included a few assessments statistics for the subprojects as of 3 February 2020: (x): x is the total number of articles within the project

• Texas (40,386): 122 unassessed, 783 not rated for importance
• Austin (1,259): 0 unassessed, 0 not rated for importance
• Dallas-Fort Worth (2,713): 352 unassessed, 604 not rated for importance
• Houston (3,837): 424 unassessed, 595 not rated for importance
• University of Houston (419): 1 unassessed, 20 not rated for importance
• University of North Texas: marked as inactive; assessment chart is not posted
• Texas A&M (719): 1 unassessed, 74 not rated for importance, marked as inactive
• Texas Tech University (727): 1 unassessed, 160 not rated for importance, marked as inactive since 2014
• University of Texas at Austin (659): 7 unassessed, 336 not rated for importance, marked as inactive since 2013

A merger of the various subprojects could result in a stronger WikiProject Texas: with a merger, the backlogs of the various subprojects for assessments and reassessments all go away. As task forces, the subprojects can share the burden of assessments, spend more time on other project functions, or spend more time in main space.

Benefits of a stronger WikiProject Texas:

1. Provide support for editors who are interested in Texas-related content.
2. If assessments and peer review are taken care at the WikiProject level, this eases the demands on overworked Wikipedia departments, including Peer Review and GA-Review.
3. Assessments offer a feedback mechanism for newer editors.
4. We know that many editors want assessments based on the number of requests at the more active WikiProjects, so improving the assessment process might help with retaining editors.

Today I am notifying the various subprojects of this proposal. Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 16:54, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

that sounds fine. I think it is very helpful that you are willing to come here to this talk page, to initiate discussion, and to provide updates of this type, on your current efforts and ideas. I appreciate this note. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 17:08, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm the other editor mentioned in the proposal, and I support simplifying the structure. I'll work to help make a plan of action for whatever project results from this process. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 18:12, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

@Bryanrutherford0 and Oldsanfelipe2:, thats sounds excellent. If I can help, please feel free to let me know any time. you are also welcome to visit my user page or talk page any time if you wish. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 19:14, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Did you mean Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Texas at Austin instead of WP:UT? The latter is a disambiguation page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:03, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

• I support converting these WikiProjects into task forces, as long as the assessment/talk page banners allow editors to designate pages to these specific task forces under the WikiProject Texas umbrella, which may require an overhaul of Template:WikiProject Texas. Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm not a super active editor on any of these projects but as a native Texan I do sometimes edit articles related to Houston, Texas at large, and the University of Texas at Austin. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 18:43, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
• Comment San Antonio is organized as a Task Force despite its legacy page name: Wikipedia:WikiProject San Antonio. The San Antonio Task Force has the ability to designate an importance level through a parameter under the WikiProject United States banner, such as "SATF=low". The Baltimore Task Force is another example: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maryland/Baltimore_task_force. I like the way that WikiProject Maryland set up tabs for each Task Force page. Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 20:41, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

  Oldsanfelipe2, In case my comment above was unclear, I'd like to see a similar feature for WikiProject Texas, where editors can designate quality and importance ratings for task forces, such as "|Austin=yes|Austin-importance=low|", "DFW=yes|DFW-importance=low" (or similar), etc. This would help reduce the number of talk page banners. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 21:07, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

  Another Believer, Are you concerned about too many banners cluttering the talk page or is this about reducing the number of templates to keep track of? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 00:19, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

  Oldsanfelipe2, Maybe both? But my initial thought was talk page clutter. Just seems a single WP:Texas template with parameters for task forces would be better than tagging applicable articles with, say, a WikiProject University of Houston banner, a WikiProject Houston banner, and a WikiProject Texas banner. (This may be a bad example if these projects don't have standalone templates at the moment, but I'm just trying to make a point. There's similar redundancy with WP University of Texas at Austin and WP Austin. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 00:39, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

• Neutral I can speak from the A&M's project point of view. We already are part of WP US. I am not sure why adding us to Texas would make much of a difference. I wasn't a big fan of merging a&m into the united states. I personally believe that universities should be merged into the WP:UNI. From what I understand, most of the A&M articles are already in WP Texas, so I don't see the point in changing anything. But, heck, if someone feels strongly about it and is willing to take care of a project that clearly isn't active, go for it. Oldag07 (talk) 18:56, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
  • Oldag07, nobody here is interested in forcing any group to merge with any other group. If you like where you are better, then please feel free to object. The level required for an objection is very low. (Think about this decision in the emotional range of "Eh, I don't really feel like cooking today" – no reasons required, and nobody gets to tell you that your opinion is different from what it really is.) Similarly, if you think that TAMU should be merged to UNI, then please feel free to start that discussion. We want every group to end up in the place that the group thinks best. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
• Comment WP:TAMU is already a subproject of WP:Texas. This is a proposal to convert the WikiProjects currently under the Texas umbrella into Task Forces, which reduces the administrative duplication for each subproject. Task forces will not have their own talk pages or be responsible for quality assessments, for example. Since there are not many editors who are active with the projects, reducing the number of talk pages to monitor will ensure that queries are not ignored. Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 20:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
• Support as most or all of these are semi-active at best. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:03, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
• Administrative point: The hard part is what happens next. You have to wait for a v-e-r-y long time, to see whether anyone has objections. You want to wait so long that even if someone has decided to go on a round-the-world cruise, they still won't be able to say "You rushed through this process!" without wondering whether other editors will be laughing because the claim seems so absurd. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

  WhatamIdoing, so what sort of very long time are you thinking would be appropriate? Weeks? Months? Years? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:02, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

  I think that somewhere between one and two months is a sufficent amount of time. There's no deadline for merging groups, and an angry response can take a lot out of unsuspecting editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:31, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

  Perhaps imagine our hypothetical editor going around the world by various means of transportation, and setting the waiting period at eighty days? Oldsanfelipe2 (talk) 20:56, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

  Perhaps we should have a special rule for any merger involving groups that support articles about French novels, that require their discussion opportunity to last for exactly 80 days. ;-) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

  I was thinking between 1 and 3 months when I asked, but did not want to push that range. More than 3 months would be stretching the point, less than 1 could be considered hasty. An integer number of months is easy to check - same date 1, 2 or 3 months later. When I propose a merge or split in article space I generally wait 1 month if there is no response (and I remember the proposal - sometimes I only rediscover it by accident years later). So far I have had no comebacks using a month. Occasionally there will be a support after several months that gets back to me via my watchlist and reminds me to do the merge or split. I guess I am saying that in my experience 1 month should be enough in almost all cases. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:13, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Support mergers: The Houston and DFW areas are entirely in Texas, and so a single poor of statewide editors can serve them. There is not as much editing traffic on WP as there used to be, so I think we need some consolidation. Also I don't see a problem with TAMU already have been put in the WPUS family as WPTX is within WPUS. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:33, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Support —¿philoserf? (talk) 22:40, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Inactive WikiProjects, should be deleted

If anybody has the know how & patients, they could/should make a list of inactive WikiProjects & any inactive WikiProject branches. Have them all nominated for deletion. GoodDay (talk) 22:58, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

As I replied when you suggested this at the proposals village pump: The work done by the WikiProject can still be of use, even if the project is no longer a central hub of activity for the topic area, such as style advice and guidance on article content and format. Additionally, preserving the historical record is important to ensure that future work can build on the past and that blind alleys aren't unnecessarily retaken. Marking them inactive may be useful to set expectations on responsiveness, but deleting them is not required. isaacl (talk) 23:13, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Basically what Isaacl said. If you scroll through WP:MfD archives (or just use the searchbox at the top to search for "WikiProject" and sort by date created), you'll see that WikiProject pages are rarely deleted unless they were created in bad-faith or by a sock-puppet. For an example of a defunct project currently being discussed, see Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion. Ajpolino (talk) 23:37, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I realise that Wikipedia has unlimited space. Just don't see the point in keeping WikiProjects & related pages, if they're no longer used. GoodDay (talk) 23:39, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

The projects are categorized by status, so the lists you are looking for are at Category:Defunct WikiProjects (and subcats) and Category:Inactive WikiProjects (and subcats). But I agree with the normal process NOT to delete these, for the same reasons as the above commentators point out. UnitedStatesian (talk) 23:46, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@GoodDay: Strong NO at least not in bulk. Individual ones can be nominated at WP:MfD. That said, the only reasons to delete it are 1) it is somehow harmful, 2) it was created in bad faith or by a banned user or otherwise "in spirit" eligible for CSD, or 3) it has zero useful information, including meta-information such as "there was a wikipedia project named foo that was active from DATE1 to DATE2 before petering out, its participants included USER1, USER2, ..., etc. etc.". Almost every WikiProject except only-1-user-participation or other created-and-abandoned projects will meet my "has useful [historical] information" "keep" criteria and should be kept unless there is a compelling reason to delete them. Marking them as historical or inactive and categorizing them as such is the proper course of action. Even the "1-user-participation" ones could be moved to User-space of the user isn't long-gone. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 15:51, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

The |importance= ratings of inactive projects can still be useful to the WP:1.0 work. That's why merging them (even of the blank-and-redirect variety) is often preferable to outright deletion of the pages for formerly active groups. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:32, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Please don't delete wikiprojects - I find their assessment grids very useful - e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject_Birds/Assessment#Statistics Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:56, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Oppose The defunct status is sufficient. —¿philoserf? (talk) 22:43, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Is this uglier or less ugly?

Hi all. Based on Sm8900's suggestions, I've made a mock-up of a slightly tweaked look for the WP:COUNCIL page with the hope of making it less ugly and more accessible to edit. Differences:

1. Replaced the blue section headers with normal wiki-markup headers (the old blue headers have a confusing "edit" link that actually edits the template instead of the section).
2. Moved the navbox up to the top-right (you couldn't do that before because it interfered with the old blue headers.
3. Added a navigation bar to the top (I nabbed this from WP:GA. Idk if this is really a good idea, but my hope is that it'll clarify to folks who are at the proposals page, WikiProject guide, or directory that these are WP Council-related pages. Also these pages' talk pages already redirect here, so this sorta clarifies the page structure I hope).

Theoretically I'd add the navbar to the top of all the pages it's linked to. See the WP:GA-related pages to get a sense of how that looks and would work. The current version is at User:Ajpolino/sandbox3 (and the header is at User:Ajpolino/sandbox2 in case you'd like to play with it; it's easy to understand and to edit, which is a big plus). Thoughts are welcome. I won't be offended if you think it's ugly. Thanks all! Ajpolino (talk) 21:35, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Less ugly! Support update to your version. Enwebb (talk) 23:00, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Ajpolino, the tab-thingy at the top is largely inaccessible on mobile devices. I recommend skipping that. I've no objection to the rest of your plans. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Agree looks fine..also agree no tabs.--Moxy 🍁 03:46, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

this looks really good. very pleased to see this here. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 05:18, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing and Moxy: I'm not particularly tech savvy, but if there's a particular way it looks strange on your mobile device, let me know and I can see if it can be fixed (it looks fine on my phone in the app and on the browser, as do the WP:GA pages). If you just prefer a tabless version, that's ok too. This is completely a question of personal preference. Thanks all for your comments! Ajpolino (talk) 16:58, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

It's a table. It therefore doesn't adjust to a small screen width. You have to scroll sideways to see past the third tab, and because it sets the width for the whole page, you then have to do that for all the text on the page. As a result, reading the first sentence works like this: "The WikiProject Council *scroll* is a group of Wikimedians *scroll back* that encourage and assist with the *scroll* development of active *scroll back* WikiProjects."

(Also, I just don't like the way it looks.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

 Done I implemented the changes (minus the tabs). I left the 1px-wide border from the old page, but colored it blue like it was in my sandbox. I don't feel strongly about the border though, so if folks feel its more distracting than appealing, feel free to remove it (or return it to gray by changing the colorcode "#4682B4" back to "silver"). Thanks all for your comments. Ajpolino (talk) 20:13, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Less ugly Nice layout. —¿philoserf? (talk) 22:46, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Absent assessment class ("draft") WikiProject Estonia

We couldn't figure out how to add class "draft" here Wikipedia:WikiProject Estonia/Assessment. The discussion in question is here: [1]. Maybe someone can solve the problem?--Estopedist1 (talk) 12:03, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Estopedist1, try QUALITY_CLASS=extended —¿philoserf? (talk) 06:12, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

@Philoserf: no, then we are again at the beginning, see first row in Template_talk:WikiProject_Estonia#Template-protected_edit_request_on_15_February_2020--Estopedist1 (talk) 06:46, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Estopedist1, I recommend asking that question at Template talk:WPBannerMeta. If you get no response there (after a few days), then take your question to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:11, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Bot to remove portal from articles?

Unresolved

Can a bot go through and remove appearances of Portal:Pandemic from articles? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 16:33, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I think I've seen you working on portal links recently. Might you be able to help here? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 14:27, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

BHG is not currently allowed to edit or discuss portals on Wikipedia. --Izno (talk) 15:31, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Izno, Oh, ok, sorry, I had no idea. Do any other editors know if this can be done? ---Another Believer _(Talk) 15:36, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

You will probably want to post at WP:Bot requests instead of here. --Izno (talk) 20:18, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Izno, Thanks!  Done --Another Believer _(Talk) 20:20, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Royalty and Nobility listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Wikipedia:WikiProject Royalty and Nobility to be moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Royalty and nobility. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 13:47, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude {{bots|deny=RMCD bot}}, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

This closed as "not moved". WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:46, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Helping someone

I need help expanding Wikipedia:WikiProject Inca Empire. I didn't create it, but I've been working hard on it. I was wondering if I could get some help. It is very short and I barely know anything about WikiProjects. Koridas (Speak) 06:47, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Inca Empire, appears to have no members. Nor is filled in. (the skeleton of templates, pages and categories are not complete) So some editors from here might need to create the skeleton. -- 65.94.170.207 (talk) 16:27, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Koridas: The project was started without making a proposal in advance and trying to look for participants. While there is no policy requiring this, not following it often leads to dead projects. You may want to talk to the project creator, Su-ilisu,emebal-meluhha, and try to coordinate work on the project. It might be useful to post a message on the talk page for WikiProjects Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Colombia. --MarioGom (talk) 14:03, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

You may want to look at WP:REVIVE for some ideas about how to recruit editors. A WikiProject is a group of people, so your main task is basically to make friends. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:49, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Guidance on specifying importance of a specific article

Is there any written/consensus guidance on how importance of an article is decided for a WikiProject? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:51, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, have you found this guidance yet? Wikipedia:Content assessment#Importance assessment —¿philoserf? (talk) 19:57, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Philoserf, Yes I have, It says only that Unlike the quality scale, the priority scale varies based on the project scope, which implies a bit, but says nothing definite. I am trying to persuade an editor not to make importance rating changes for projects that they are not a member of, based on number of recent pageviews.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:11, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, ah. I had the same issue. I pointed the editor to the project’s importance/priority guidance and suggested that if the editor wanted to influence that guidance our talk page was the forum. —¿philoserf? (talk) 05:44, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, The guidance I mentioned. Wikipedia:WikiProject Backpacking#Priority/importance —¿philoserf? (talk) 05:46, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Philoserf, Thanks for the link, My situation involves an editor who claims that anyone can rate importance and that even a random rating is better than none, and appears to be doing a lot of rating using a gadget, which may be fine for class, but not so good for importance. I am waiting for their response to my explanation of why I disagree. Your link may help if they remain unconvinced. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:31, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I found this too: Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Release_Version_Criteria#Importance_of_topic · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:22, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, as far as I know, most WikiProjects rely on the boilerplate importance assessment guidelines, which are often not very useful. Some WikiProjects have actual project-specific guidelines with examples: Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Assessment or Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19/Assessment. As a participant in some less active WikiProject such as WP:SOCIALISM, I often rate importance based on a pure guess (unless contested). From time to time, I go through the list of articles in Top/High/Mid importance and re-rate some based on comparative assessment. MarioGom (talk) 13:53, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Number of pageviews is useless here. A topic can be both high traffic but only tangential to some of the listed projects. MarioGom (talk) 13:57, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Peter, you can also tell the editor that considering page views is superfluous, as the WP:1.0 team automatically checks page views anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:51, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Auto-assessing as redirect

I just restarted a bot task that removes the "class" parameter from WikiProject banners on the talk pages of redirects. The task was approved on the assumption that WPBannerMeta would auto-classify the pages as redirects. However, in practice, some banners do not seem to do this automatic classification; an example I just ran into was {{WikiProject Ships}} (example showing "unassessed"). I think this has to do with WPBannerMeta's "auto" parameter (but {{WikiProject Animation}} seems to auto-assess even though it lacks one?). I certainly can't just enable auto-classification of redirects for such projects, right? In that case, should I just have the bot skip such banners? I'm not sure there's an easy way for the bot to make that check. Thoughts are very much appreciated. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:22, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Enterprisey, you are correct that you shouldn't "just enable" it, but you can "just" leave a quick message for each of the affected groups, and then enable it if (when) there are no objections. I'd wait at least a week to check for responses, but waiting a whole month might be unnecessary. I predict that most groups either won't care or will be grateful that someone's volunteering to fix their template for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:53, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Programming Languages

I want to restart this project. Computer Science is very broad topic and so is the topic of Programming Languages. It is very odd to have it merged in WikiProject Computer Science and makes it very difficult to find topics solely related to Programming Languages. Harsh Rathod Poke me! 19:22, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Harshrathod50, have you tried discussing it with other participants on WikiProject Computer Science? Maybe a Task Force would be more appropriate? MarioGom (talk) 20:09, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Harshrathod50, what is it that you want to achieve by restarting the project? It is not clear how restarting a project is intended to make it easier to find topics solely related to programming languages if that is your aim. Maybe your needs would be better met by working on navboxes or categories, or an outline list or index to programming languages, or finding some new way of navigating through related topics.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:12, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:HISTORY and WP:Military history

I was wondering if these two projects should be merged in to one and make Military a task force of the History project? Govvy (talk) 13:23, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Your interest in taxonomy is misplaced. WikiProjects form around a group of editors working a specific topic. MILHIST is one of the most-successful WikiProject on this website, which already has several well-regarded task forces under it. WP History, meanwhile, is moribund. Articles about historical topics abound but the userbase doesn't congregate on the project's talk page. I don't see what your proposal would accomplish except offending long-term productive editors. Chris Troutman (talk) 13:40, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

↑ What he said. This is akin to saying we should abolish WikiProject France because we already have a WikiProject Europe. ‑ Iridescent 14:23, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Okay, it was just a thought, I don't know why you would take offence to that! :/ heh, didn't even know there was a WikiProject Europe! :/ Govvy (talk) 16:48, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Govvy, More to the point: What purpose would the suggested merge be intended to serve, and how would the merge serve that purpose? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:19, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: Don't mean to be rude, but I thought it would of been obvious that I wanted history to be more under one project roof instead of split off! :/ I am surprised that WP:History has a list of Child projects, sounds so weird! I really don't know why you posted, when it already got slammed. Govvy (talk) 06:13, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Govvy, The previous comments were made based on assumptions of what you meant. They may have assumed wrongly, so I asked for clarification in case there was a non-obvious but valid reason that we had missed. I still do not see what practical advantage you were hoping for if there is one. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:45, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Project Mysticism

Sorry about this, but I appear to have done something wrong in attempting to add WikiProject Mysticism to a proposal for new WikiProjects. If one looks at proposals for new WikiProjects for April 2020, one will see "Brass Bands" and if you click on this, you will get a proposal for a project on brass bands, but if you click on Mysticism, you will just get taken to the Wikipedia article on Mysticism. Does any one know what I have done wrong, or more specifically, what I have not done right? Vorbee (talk) 16:09, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Looks like you've fixed it! The linking syntax isn't always intuitive but briefly: [[Page name]] wikilinks to the page of that title (in your case Mysticism). The link [[/Page name]] links to the Page_name_you're_at + "/Page name" (in your case, it now links to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Mysticism). And of course, the | changes the appearance of the link. So those links say [[/Mysticism|Mysticism]] so that they'll go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Whatever_the_name_of_your_proposal_is but the link will just say Whatever_the_name_of_your_proposal_is. Hope that helps! Ajpolino (talk) 18:50, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Issue with Revival Comment

I am in the process of reviving both Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia & Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Pronunciation_task_force per the guidelines located at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Guide#Revival. When I removed the inactive links, Nardog reverted my edits asking why?, however, it was stated when I removed the tags that I am reviving them. There are a few people interested in this project and the task force is under the spoken project, so I am reviving them both as some words within certain dialects need help from those around the world who know of or speak the language. After I reverted Nardog's edits to make them back to the old status, I posted on his talk page that I am reviving both of them and asked him to stop reverting what I am doing. He then went after that and reverted again. Am I misinterpreting the Revival of Councils article in which it states in the opening sentence "Any editor may revive an inactive WikiProject by changing the {{WikiProject status}} template parameter to active"?

Thank you, Galendalia _{CVU Member} \ ^{Chat Me Up} 22:28, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

@Galendalia: I wish you notified me of this thread. I appreciate your explanation of your intention on my talk and I have no problem with you reviving the task force, but in the process of reverting me reverting you, which I now know was ill-motivated, you also removed {{Update}} which I had added to the Tasks section, which is woefully outdated with references to templates that no longer exist (see MOS:PRON for how we handle pronunciations now). So I tried to restore the template, but this time I inadvertently reinstated {{WikiProject status|Defunct}} instead of {{Update}}, which I have now corrected. Again, I have no problem with your revival and I hope this explanation clears it up for you. Nardog (talk) 13:05, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Activity Graph

Hello all! I'm putting together an op-ed for The Signpost on how wikiprojects have gradually been phasing out and becoming defunct, and I was curious if there was a graph or chart somewhere showing wikiproject activity declining over the years. If not, do any of you know of a good tool to put such a graph together? Thank you all. -- puddleglum^2.0 00:55, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

You could get each of the revisions in the WikiProject Directory with some bot tool (if someone is interested), or if you don't think you have the time, do it by hand in Excel. That's about 5 years of data or so--I don't know of another similar convenient source. --Izno (talk) 01:34, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply - it's just for one article, so I don't think it's worth the trouble. All the best, -- puddleglum^2.0 02:33, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Maybe all edits to wikiprojects' talk pages? Enterprisey (talk!) 05:27, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

,2,Activity Graph,15,3:Enterprisey, interesting idea; I think to would work, if you or someone else wanted to put something like that together. I'm personally not coding oriented, so can't do much in that area. Thanks, -- puddleglum^2.0 15:34, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

not sure what went wrong with the beginning of that comment, perhaps a bug in reply-link? -- puddleglum^2.0 14:48, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Template on articles relevant to WikiProject proposals

I have put forward a proposal for my idea at Wikipedia: Village pump, but no one appears to have taken any notice of it there, so I shall put forth my proposal here. I have made a proposal here for WikiProject Mysticism, and if one goes to the article on mysticism, one can see that the information about this proposal is on the talk page of this article. Similarly, if one goes to the article on Justin Bieber, one can see that information about the relevant WikiProject proposal is on the talk page. My proposal is that when some one puts in a proposal for a new WikiProject, a new template gets added to the relevant article on the main page (not just the talk page) saying "A proposal has been made at Wikipedia: WikiProject Council to start a WikiProject on..." This might help people to become more aware of new WikiProject proposals. One can see that there are proposals for WikiProject Brass Bands and WikiProject Hausa, but if one goes to the articles on Brass band and Hausa people, one can see nothing to inform one about the news of these proposals for WikiProjects, which I feel strengthens the case for such a template. What do other Wikipedians think of this idea? Many thanks in advance for any feedback.Vorbee (talk) 13:04, 15 May 2020 (UTC) The article on Brass band is headed by a template saying "This article needs additional sources for verification". My idea is to have a similar template heading the relevant article, only saying "A proposal has been made at Wikipedia: WikiProject Council for a WikiProject on..." Vorbee (talk) 13:28, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi Vorbee, I'm sympathetic to the idea since there's not much use to an unnoticed WikiProject proposal. But clearly there's a longstanding hesitation to mention project space on articles, and I don't think this is an extreme enough reason to break that tradition. If the intention is to invite other established editors, I think messages on the talk page of the article, and on related WikiProjects would be just as effective. If the intention is to entice readers to begin editing, I think inviting them to a proposed project is not the best way to do so. In my experience watching from the sidelines, WikiProjects that start with all new editors tend to falter and fail quickly. If the goal is to bring in new editors, it would make more sense to slap a banner on medical, military, tree of life, etc. articles that say "This article is supported by WikiProject Medicine (or insert relevant project)! You can help. Go to the project noticeboard to pick up a shovel and start digging!" Many proposals don't seem to be widely advertised at related projects and talk pages; however, very sadly, many that are advertised still don't get much interest. There just aren't enough editors to populate all the WikiProject topics that should exist. So we're stuck with the topics that we can get enough interest on. Happy to hear the comments of others. Ajpolino (talk) 16:31, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Many years ago there was a continuing flow of new proposals & many new projects set up, all or almost all of which died from inactivity, usually after a bout of banner posting. These days even very well-established projects produce little useful action or discussion. I think you need at least 10 busy, experienced and keen editors to make a project work. Otherwise they just give certain types of editors things to occupy themselves with, at no gain to the project. I'm pretty prejudiced against new projects, & am not keen to make it easier to set them up, while they remain unfashionable among editors. Why the project idea no longer seems to work I'm not sure, but at present that is the case. Johnbod (talk) 14:12, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject Black Lives Matter

I've started WikiProject Black Lives Matter, for any editors who may be interested in joining or helping to improve the project's framework with helpful tools, etc. Thank you. ---Another Believer _(Talk) 22:29, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

WikiProject banner shell

Your feedback concerning the expression "Click [show] for further details" used in Template:WikiProject banner shell would be appreciated, at this discussion. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:20, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

How do you start a WikiProject?

When you feel have enough Wikipedians to start a WikiProject, how do start it? Do you just type in "WikiProject (name of WikiProject)" and seeing that will be in red Wikilinks, then start it? Vorbee (talk) 19:43, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

The short answer is yes. More detailed directions on how to get started and utilize some of the common WikiProject tools are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/WikiProject. If you end up with other questions as you go, feel free to ask here. Ajpolino (talk) 21:37, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

New and unusual WP

Attention has been called to the new Wikipedia:WikiProject ConwayLibrary, which seems to function more like a WikiEd course (though it isn't one) than a WikiProject - a single user group all centered around a school, with a set list of articles and a principle editor for each of them. Just alerting the WP council group to it, perhaps you can offer some guidance. Their coordinator also seems unfamiliar with Wikipedia, so may need help on that front. Best, Kingsif (talk) 13:50, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

How many interested Wikipedians?

How many Wikipedians does one need to show an interest in a new WikiProject before the WikiProject can be started? Vorbee (talk) 08:49, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

• Vorbee, my reading of the WikiProject Council's guidelines is that you are advised to have a minimum of 6 active editors (including yourself) in order to effectively start a WP. However, based on the historical record of WPs, I would recommend that after getting 6 editors and officially launching your WP, that you aim at keeping *60* active editors/participants in order to maintain your WP in "active" status long-term. History DMZ ^{(talk)+(ping)} 11:59, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
  • History DMZ, where on earth did you get that figure? I very much doubt there's any Wikiproject with 60 active participants, even WIRED, MILHIST and MED (the last three Wikiprojects that could credibly be considered "active" nowadays). ‑ Iridescent 14:13, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
    • Iridescent, noting that these are a few months out of date, Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/All sorted on Participants yields WIRED, FOOTY, MILHIST, GOCE, MED, VG, and FILM (just sneaking in) and a few other 'meta' groups. --Izno (talk) 14:36, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
      • GOCE is misleading since presumably people either complaining about their incompetence, or posting requests for them to assist, are counted by the bot as "active participants" because they've commented there. I forgot about FOOTY and VG. My basic point—that 60 is an insanely high mark to set which nothing except the broadest of broad-topic projects could ever reach—still stands. As I've said before on many occasions, because the names keep changing as editors come, go, and come back again, people tend to wildly overestimate how many active editors Wikipedia has at any given time. ‑ Iridescent 14:48, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
        • I did not attempt to defend the particular number, only pointed to a resource which makes it easy to assess whether the particular number is reasonable. :) --Izno (talk) 14:52, 16 June 2020 (UTC)
        • Iridescent Ok, first take it easy, this is not the BAR Exam. Second, you did not understand my response at all. The number 60 which I *suggested* is an *ideal* figure that would be nice to have *eventually* to be *comfortably* in the *active* status category *for years to come*. 60 active members would also mean 60 members that in the aggregate are active enough to keep the WP continuously in active status. Also, WP Medicine has over 100 active members most signing up just in the last 3 years and keeps a separate list of inactive ones. WP COVID-19 has almost 200 members, all are active. The Article Rescue Squadron has a list of almost 100 active members and a separate list below of another 93 inactive ones. I can keep providing more examples, but 3 is good enough. As you can see I get my figures from the WPs' own participant pages. Moreover, you just made my point for me! The fact, according to you, that only 3 WPs are considered active nowadays highlights the need for WPs to maintain a large number of active members, like 60. Cordially, History DMZ ^{(talk)+(ping)} 15:57, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

• @History DMZ As a member of WP:cleanup I can tell you that the "active members" number is not a good indicator of how many people actually take part in the WikiProject's activities. We have 120 "active members", but only about 10 regulars to our main activity. Many people seem to sign up simply because they do cleanup work, not because they want to do cleanup work within WP:cleanup. I suspect that the same is true for ARS - many people signing up because they consider themselves article rescuers and not because they will regularly take a look at ARS' rescue list.

To be honest, I think the most important factor for WikiProject survival is having a good concept. The number of initial participants is just another measure for how good the WikiProject idea is. Kind regards from PJvanMill (talk) 21:05, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

PS: Moving members from the "active" to the "inactive" section is not automated, it has to be done by hand; another reason why the member list should not be used to assess activity levels.

Pruning tool for user lists

Hi folks! Just thought I'd drop a note here for WikiProject coordinators who might be interested: my bot, Yapperbot (talk · contribs), is now running a "user list pruning" task.

What this means is you can configure the bot with a template, much like an archiving bot, and it will automatically detect users on your signup list's page, remove users who haven't edited in a time you specify, remove indefinitely-blocked users, and rename users who've undergone a global rename. Hopefully, this'll make lists of members and the like a little easier to manage.

You can find out how to use the bot over at User:Yapperbot/Pruner.

Hope this is helpful, feel free to shoot me any questions! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 21:35, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, Naypta, that sounds great! Two questions:

1. is it possible to specify a section to which the bot should move the inactive users (not the indefblocked ones) instead of removing them?
2. I assume the bot can handle entries other than the standard # ~~~~ as long as there's at least one link to a user page or a user talk page in there, correct? Potential errors I can think of are double-counting or partially renaming # [[User:Example]] ~~~~ or ignoring # [[User talk:Example|Example]]

Kind regards from PJvanMill (talk) 22:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Naypta Having looked at User:Yapperbot/Pruner/formats.json and the code itself, I have found the answers to my questions. Currently, the pruner task cannot be used on lists like this.

It seems that #1 is not a current feature and would be pretty hard to implement fully. Second best would be an option to run the bot on inactive and indeffed users in two separate edits, so the inactive ones can be put in the "Inactive members" section by a human.

The "link" format currently does not deal with fancy signatures (or anything else before the link), nor with user talk links, but those should be quite straightforward. It seems to me that getting the task to rename properly when there are multiple links on one line would require a lot more effort. Kind regards from PJvanMill (talk) 01:32, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

@PJvanMill: Hey, thanks for the questions! You're correct that the pruning currently won't move inactive users to a separate section, but this oughtn't actually be that difficult to implement. The bot detects the entire line on the page for an inactive user, so it should fairly easily be able to just add them to the bottom of another page. This would probably require a nod from the BAG to do, but it wouldn't be too difficult to get approved I don't imagine if you think it would be useful!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "does not deal with fancy signatures" - it doesn't need to. So long as it can detect the user link somewhere on the line, it should match (in theory). User talk links not renaming is a good point, I'll go and fix that up now - should be easy enough to just run a straight replace on that.

Is there a particular use case you had in mind for renaming multiple different users on a single line? I can't think where that would be useful in particular.

Cheers! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 09:05, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Naypta, I meant multiple links to the same user on one line - I thought it didn't do that, but it might be that I just misread the code. About the fancy signatures, I was looking at the "link" regex, not the "signature" regex, excuse me. Kind regards from PJvanMill (talk) 13:53, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

It might be nice to get the bot maintaining WP:WikiProject Directory and related pages up and running again; I left a note at User talk:Harej/Archive39#Members lists for WikiProjects but the operator has not responded. (It looks like there have been a few questions in that regard.) If you want to take on a second task. --Izno (talk) 23:36, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Izno: Thanks for the suggestion! It looks like the BRFA had source code for Harej's bots in, but that source code has since disappeared, so it might take a little bit of thought in terms of how to make a similar thing again. I can look into it if you think it would be useful, though! Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 09:09, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

The source file names changed and the directories too, but the https://github.com/harej/reports_bot/tree/master/tasks looks like the main directory (feel free to browse). --Izno (talk) 12:30, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

This looks to be it, not in "tasks" but in "unported": directory.py. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 23:24, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

New Category:Pages by WikiProject

New maintenance category Pages by WikiProject has been created. It is an analogue of Category:Articles by WikiProject, but for categories, which are not restricted to articles. —⁠andrybak (talk) 14:40, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Rename discussion for Category:WikiProjects

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 August 2 § Category:WikiProjects. —⁠andrybak (talk) 14:47, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

River Thames project articles

Category:River Thames articles by quality and Category:River Thames articles by importance are empty despite many articles tagged with this project. The project (and subsequently templates) was renamed and this fix was made but the categories are still empty. Crouch, Swale (talk) 16:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale: The WikiProject is marked as inactive. See WP:REVIVE for revival guidance. {{WikiProject River Thames}} has also been set to inactive with {{WPBannerMeta/inactive template code. --Bamyers99 (talk) 17:14, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Bamyers99 I wasn't asking about reviving it, I just checked because I thought that maybe fixes after the page moves hadn't been done. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:16, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Fixing template of a WikiProject

Hi, hope you are doing well, I recently created a WikiProject Wikipedia: WikiProject Chenab Valley and it's template Template: WikiProject Chenab Valley. I am getting many issues as I am not expert in this. Whenever I rate any article related to this project, there is no option for rating as Stub, Start C, B etc. And there are other issues to. Kindly help me to fix this issues and guide me how to fix other issues. Thank You. — The Chunky urf Al Kashmiri ^{(Speak🗣️ or Write✍️)} 18:38, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:Tasks § Adding a "date of last update" line

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Tasks § Adding a "date of last update" line. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:07, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Dissociation between Wikiprojects and portals

In last years there has been a Dissociation between Wikiprojects and portals. Many active Wikiprojects like Buddhism and Basketball no longer have a portal. Some portals are maintained by several Wikiprojects like Portal:Computer programming and Portal:Society, there are Wikiprojects that maintain several portals like WikiProject Military history and WikiProject Germany and portals without any associated Wikiprojects like Portal:Civilizations and Portal:Telephones. So I suggest removing the portal, portal2 and portal3 parameters from Wikipedia: WikiProject Council/Directory/WikiProject.Guilherme Burn (talk) 19:56, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Most WikiProjects seem inactive

At Template talk:AFC submission#Improving the odds of a speedy review, User:Headbomb told me "Active WikiProjects are a dime a dozen, and are far from the exception". This interests me, and I think it is better continued here.

It has been my "impression" for a long time that most WikiProjects are inactive. I have perused Category:WikiProjects by status from time to time, and I find that a survey of Category:Active WikiProjects main talk pages shows mostly negligible activity. Noting biases here, I am counting WikiProjects by title, not coverage; there may be activity not reflected on the main talk page; and my attention tends to be drawn to problem areas.

It is also my impression over many years that when Headbomb says something, he is right. I have two questions.

1. What is a good measure of WikiProject activity? Does it matter that "Category:WikiProjects by status" is laggy? Does any good come from pushing WikiProjects out of "Active" and into "Semi-active", or is that sort of thing discouraging to the few active members and a self-fulfilling prophesy?

2. Should care be take to not tag new articles with WikiProject tags from inactive WikiProjects? I think yes, because to tag a new page with an inactive WikiProject is to mis-indicate to the author that other editors have already taken an interest in the new article. I think it better to advise the author of the new page to look into relevant WikiProject, and to tag it themself, thinking that this will have the benefit of encouraging new involvement in the WikiProject.

--SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:03, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

One thought that's related to, but doesn't directly answer, your questions... Many of the not-actually-active projects in the "active" category are task forces of larger projects. E.g. Australian motorsports, which is just a part of WP Australia. If you look at the task force talk page, it's dead, but the broader WP Australia talk page is doing fine. A good number of task forces should probably be redirected, but they're not doing much harm just sitting there. Calliopejen1 (talk) 01:22, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Some amount of merging niche inactive projects would definitely help. I think we also need better ways to measure which projects are actually active or inactive (this will help inform our merging or signalling, plus enable data collection). {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:44, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Most WikiProjects seem inactive I'm going to put a big fat on this. Now, on the other issues

1. Very few things are a good measure of WikiProject activity on their own. Which project is 'active' and which is 'not active', or whatever, is a complex a nebulous function of

a) Article creation in the subject area

b) General editor activity in the subject area, from article expansions, to gnoming, to cleanup, to whatever

c) Editor activity on the associated WikiProject pages themselves

d) Editor activity using associated WikiProject pages which don't necessarily involve edits to said project page (e.g. several people might use Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Article alerts without getting involved anywhere else in the WikiProject Videogames subpages)

A project might be focused on content creation (e.g. a putative WikiProject Tulips, or maybe a specific taskforce) and get along just fine uncontroversially, without much activity in the deletion areas, or much discussion on the talk pages because most editors active in the area are used to the Wikipedian standards, and nothing particularly contentious is happening on those articles. Another might generate a lot of discussion about the minutiae of something, which affects 3 articles out of 5000.

2. Why does it even matters? WikiProjects are merged and revived all the time. WP:GLASS is pretty much dead currently. But if 3 months from now, a few people from the Glass Packaging Institute decide to get involved, they'll have the infrastructure already setup for them. Or maybe someone reads Talk:Glass and notices that WikiProject, and decides to gets involve with it. Sure they may be lonely, but they'll again have the infrastructure setup and can start watching Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Taskforces/Glass/Article alerts and get involved with those discussions. There might be a case to remove the banners of a handful of WikiProjects that are so tiny and hopelessly specialized (WikiProject Blue Flowers of North Ireland; WikiProject Short Stories of H.P. Lovecraft), but those have usually been merged into more useful projects and with their banners replaced and G6'd. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:56, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

I also don't see that this is an issue: it's just math resulting from any set having individual members with a finite lifespan, as any WikiProject does. It is also true that most Wikipedia editors are inactive. (and most humans who ever lived are dead) Many (most?) of the inactive or defunct WikiProjects are on topics that are so narrow as to never have been all that useful. I focus on the active WikiProjects; the population outside that group is not relevant in any way. And are there enough WikiProjects such that every one of the 6-million-plus articles can be in at least one active WikiProject? Of course the answer is yes. UnitedStatesian (talk) 03:28, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm probably one of the most active editors on glass (Enamelled glass dyk last month) & I had no idea WP:GLASS existed. What on earth is it doing hanging off the Physics Wikiproject?? Crazy. Now that I do know, what does that change? Talk page sections: 1 in 2020, 2 in 2019. In general, most projects are either dead or useless (mainly meaning that project talk entries don't get any useful response. There are far too many subprojects. Johnbod (talk) 03:03, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

It started as an effort to cover the physics of glass mostly, and then enlarged to cover other things. It's fully independent of WP:PHYS for this reason (e.g. has its own {{WikiProject Glass}} banner), and could be moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Glass without any issue. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:42, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian, are there enough WikiProjects such that every one of the 6-million-plus articles can be in at least one active WikiProject? Of course the answer is yes. I'm not so sure about that. There are plenty of extremely niche inactive WikiProjects, but there are also a bunch in important, high-level areas (often ones impacted by WP:Systemic bias) that are inactive. I recently wanted to bring up something relating to stove, and the only really relevant pages were WT:WikiProject Food and drink and WT:WikiProject Home Living. I posted at both of those, but it was only a month later when I found an excuse to mention the issue somewhere else (I think at one of the pumps, perhaps) that I finally got any reply. Take a look at those two pages — you'll see a decent number of posts (a disconcerting percentage of which are One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!), but what you won't see is any threading. What that means is that no one is watching those pages, and the only people going there are those who are throwing out questions into the void. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:54, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Sdkb, sorry, I misunderstood your original point; this latest point has greater resonance with me, which I would state as "too many of the ~900 WikiProjects marked as active aren't really" and agree with 100%. I find that if a WikiProject talk page doesn't seen to have threading, I add to my post some pings of some of the folks who are listed as project participants and currently active. And of course you've come to the right place; the council welcomes your participation here in anything WikiProject-related, and hearing any ideas you have to improve the project space. UnitedStatesian (talk) 05:04, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

• Thanks all for your time and answers. Going back to Q2, Am I hearing correctly that most people don't think it does any harm to tag a new article with an inactive WikiProject's banner? NB. Don't worry about taskforces, just whole WikiProjects. I think there is something in the word "taskforce" that implies an objective that will be achieved, meaning eventual inactivity is a goal.

With regards to tagging talk pages with WikiProject banners, I have just gone through a couple dozen year old articles, and not found any inactive WikiProject banners. Maybe everything is OK. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:12, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe, the only potential harm done by tagging a page with an inactive project is that it might encourage someone at the page to post at that project when they'd be better off posting at a more active one, or to assume that a page is being monitored when it is not. I'd make sure that every new talk page has at least one active project, and ideally one active project with a reasonably narrow scope (e.g. not just WikiProject United States), but that might not be possible for some pages depending on editing activity in that area. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:50, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Agree with that. Tagging for an inactive project is pointing people to a dead end. Johnbod (talk) 03:03, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

I disagree. If the inactive project's banner template is coded correctly, the template will say "a project which is currently considered to inactive." (e.g.: {{WikiProject Event Venues}}) This text makes it unlikely people will be led astray (unless they want to reactivate the project: a good thing) and has the added benefit of obviating the need to retag/reassess every page if the project were ever reactivated. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:38, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Just noticed this talk.....was on a zoom conference about this topic just a few weeks ago. In response to what most found valuable about so call dead projects I wrote about at Wikipedia:WikiProject#Inactive projects.--Moxy 🍁 02:59, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

That's an excellent point. A WikiProject may look inactive because it has achieved its objective. I had come here assuming "never active" WikiProjects, or "bad idea" WikiProjects. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe, I can think of very few subject-area WikiProjects that could be justified in saying that they've completed their objective. To do that, they'd have to bring every significant page in their domain to "complete" status, which is technically how FA is defined, but even if we give a more realistic bar of B-class, I don't think there are really topics outside of coinage or hurricanes where that's even in sight. WP:Wikipedia is a work in progress. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:09, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Correct. Johnbod (talk) 03:03, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Point being missed here...project is always a work in progress...but what can be done is the organizational aspect of how the project and its pages should be structured. Comes a point in many projects that content is the only thing to deal with because the project has all its protocols in place and talks take place at individual articles. Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers is a good example.... they all know each other well and go to each-other directly to talk about things.--Moxy 🍁 15:46, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Square Enix with some 450 articles is closing in. --Izno (talk) 12:38, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Until, of course, new games come out, alongside new designers, CEOs, ... Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:51, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Also disagree. The only reason an active subject-area project has become inactive, at least so far, is that the interested editors have moved on to other things (here or elsewhere). And that's ok. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:43, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Automated wikiproject directory working again

Reports bot is now updating the automated wikiproject directory again, including the "active wikiproject editors" pages. Presumably Harej found and fixed the issue, so thanks Harej! PJvanMill)talk( 13:08, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Wonderful great news.--Moxy 🍁 14:38, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Replace participant lists with "designated representatives"?

The main way I use participant lists (other than adding myself to them) is when I come across a topic area I'm unfamiliar with and am seeking someone knowledgeable about it to ping. However, the lists as they currently exist don't serve that function well—there are way too many names, many of whom are no longer active or were never that active in the first place. The list is also redundant to the category of project contributors, which creates excess work for editors who have to list themselves in two places. And it's worth emphasizing that Wikipedia places no intrinsic value on "badges" unless they do something to help build the encyclopedia.

Given all this, I think an overhaul of participant lists is in order. I propose that we replace participant lists at most WikiProjects (if some want to opt out, fine) with the following:

1. a template that automatically generates a list of the roughly 10 most active participants based on project talk page activity. I think I've seen this somewhere at some other Wikimedia project.
2. a template that links to or transcludes the participants category, so that those who really want to see everyone can do so.
3. a "designated representative" or two for the project. This will be an active editor in good standing who has been selected by the project to field questions about it or its topic area from outside editors. The role won't come with any explicit responsibilities other than being listed and thus likely being pinged more often, and (consistent with Wikipedia's de jure non-hierarchical culture) the designated representative de jure should not be afforded any additional weight in intra-project discussions just because of their role.

I think that this change would help a lot for less active WikiProjects, where the question for someone coming across them is mainly "who is still around who I can talk to"? Listing a single editor or two for the representative would be a lot easier to maintain than trying to keep a full participant list up to date, and the category list/most active list would be generally self-maintaining. What do you all think? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:15, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm agnostic on the proposal (though I do feel participants lists to be generally unhelpful), just wanted to point out that Reports bot used to maintain for each project a list of "active WikiProject editors" (2+ edits in the past 90 days to the project's project pages), as well as a separate list of "Active subject-area editors" (5+ edits in the past 30 days to the articles with the project's banner on their talk). Perhaps that's where you saw a list of active participants? For an example, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject History. Reports bot seems to have stalled on that task again; I'm not sure why. Ajpolino (talk) 20:18, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Whats most important is the amount of watchers for a project...no point in posting if no one is watching Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers. As for the proposal...seems logical if someone wants to do the work..but the council (a project with no members list) has always advised that each project pic its own way of member tracking if its even wanted. Many dont formally join a list but are around because many believe that some projects are centered around cabals. --Moxy 🍁 23:40, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Is there some set of templates with a standard format for project pages for someone starting up a new WikiProject? If so, that might be the thing to update. (And if not, creating that is something the WikiProject Council ought to do, since having every WikiProject custom-designed is a waste of editor effort.) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:42, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject.--Moxy 🍁 15:20, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Ajpolino, should we make a request at WP:BOTREQ to get the bot reactivated? (As an aside, I've brought up before that it's definitely not good that we have so many bots that just stop functioning without notifying anyone. It resulted in the creation of User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, but that doesn't seem to be helping much here.) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:52, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: I left a note at the operator's talk page. If we don't hear from him, or he says he doesn't have time to maintain that task, I'm happy to post at BOTREQ. It does seem like bots tend to quietly retire around here... Ajpolino (talk) 15:50, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

I think this is generally a good idea, but I think it should be opt-in, not opt-out. I expect many WikiProjects will want to have their own mix between these three things and a standard participant list. PJvanMill)talk( 09:57, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

(Harej's bot is working again.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:53, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Template:WP Rocketry

Resolved

 – WP:MULTI fork of Template talk:WikiProject Rocketry#Edit protected. --Izno (talk) 14:58, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Can someone revert the image used on {{WikiProject Rocketry}} to the old one? The new one barely has any rocket, and is mostly a U.S. flag instead. Since the WikiProject isn't a U.S. WikiProject, this is a bad choice. -- 65.94.170.98 (talk) 03:58, 28 September 2020 (UTC)