Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/July 2011

Rollover

Advice please.

I had 1515 rollover words from the March Drive to add into the May Drive. May Drive produced 10051 words, for which I gratefully received the 8000 word Star. Is my rollover for July calculated on the 1515 + 10051 - 8000 (3566), or on just the May (2051)?

Also I added June 11 copyedit temps to Dennis Elwell (astrologer) and Chris Newman (actor), two articles that I have recently edited (one a major edit through an intercession request from two warring editors) for an opportunity to be independently reviewed by others during the Drive - I shall not review them. Although templated in good faith, I was wondering if this was a kosher thing to do or a conflict of interest. Acabashi (talk) 12:19, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Refer to this document - you have 3,566 rollover words. As long as you contribute to the next drive, your word total accrues. This is discussed in the FAQ.

Re your second question, I don't see any conflict of interest. Bear in mind though that you should not then copy edit these articles, or count them as a copy edit (which you've already said you're not intending to do) - refer to point 4 here. If you want them 'independently reviewed' quickly perhaps you should add them to the Requests page rather than just waiting for someone to stumble across them during the drive (which may not happen for say 18 months). --jjron (talk) 13:48, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Saul Ascher

I started to copy edit the Saul Ascher article as part of this drive, but I have found that much of the article is confusing and sometimes incomprehensible. Perhaps a fluent German speaking editor can look at the sources in German and make sense of this article. I improved the grammar at the beginning of the article, and added a good many links for places and people. I cannot take any credit for my effort as part of this drive. --DThomsen8 (talk) 18:46, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

It is likely a machine translation of the German article. This type of article is very difficult if not impossible to copy edit. Thank you for your efforts. ==Diannaa (talk) 03:43, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I re-translated the top 3 sections of Jewish activist "Saul Ascher" (almost verbatim from German Wikipedia) and retagged sections for {copyedit|..September 2010}, since the article is read only a few times per day and is tolerable now. Looks like a machine translation because the direct quotes have been treated as flat text, with no attempt to use quotation marks. Will fix other 3 prose sections later. -Wikid77 15:23, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

I just did the same thing with Airports of Thailand (although, it's my first ever set of edits on Wikipedia, and I will be heart broken if I can't claim it for the drive). I made use of the template below, so that no one else wastes their time until someone knowledgeable can come along and do a rewrite. {{GOCEreviewed}} LizFlash (talk)

Using nowiki delimiters removes this talk page from the category. --DThomsen8 (talk) 19:52, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Leaderboard updates

My thanks to whoever is putting me, and perhaps others, into the leaderboard at the proper places. Keep up the good work! The table is a bit tricky, and I was reluctant to start updating it, but now that I am on there, I can update the numbers. --DThomsen8 (talk) 16:29, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Graphs not updating

I have no idea why the graphs are not updating. If you click on the picture, you can see that the graphs have been updated, but it does not update on the article page. I'm not sure if truncating the "Wikipedia articles needing copy edit" cat box is causing this problem as the problem only started since this was truncated (in the last drive). Anyone who knows how to fix this, please help. Thanks in advance. – SMasters (talk) 06:59, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

I made the pic 30px larger, and it seems to have updated now. – SMasters (talk) 10:11, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Try purging the page cache. Resizing the image may have done this for you. Usually forcing a page reload in your browser does the job (generally Ctrl+F5, but I can't speak for all browsers and systems (oh, see Wikipedia:Bypass your cache for details)). --jjron (talk) 18:12, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Page in use, copyedit done.

For example, you can place a special "page in use" tag when you are copy editing, and another tag on the talk page when you finish.

Please add these two tags to this sentence in the article. Otherwise, they are hard to find. --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

 Done --Diannaa (talk) 14:31, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, but just where are they? --DThomsen8 (talk) 14:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

They are found under the "Templates" tab. Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Templates – SMasters (talk) 07:16, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Viver

• Viver section (208), another section undone

I am giving up on this one. Can I claim the 208 for the one section done, or can I leave both to whoever does the following section? --DThomsen8 (talk) 14:48, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Might as well take credit for the part that you did. Barnstars are free :) --Diannaa (talk) 18:40, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Give User:Dthomsen8 extra credit for notifying us about that hideously mangled "Spanglish" article (viewed 15 times per day). I had seen it weeks ago, so I continued editing the page with another 200(!) changes (including spaces) to get basic clarity. That article ("Viver") can still be improved, by people who can translate from Spanish sources, or know those religious rites. Perhaps the simple name "Viver" had been attracting the 450 readers per month, so it had been a real embarrassment as convoluted text. -Wikid77 14:09, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Margret Green or Margaret Green?

I had just finished updating the Margret Green Junior High School as part of this copy editing drive, when I discovered that there is another article, Margaret Green Junior High School, almost the same as the one I did but not copy edited. The proper article name is with the "a" in Margaret. Now I do not know what to do, so I am asking for help here. Please make sure my improvements and copy editing is retained. --DThomsen8 (talk) 15:23, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

The articles were both created by the same person, one day apart. I have transferred your content over to the "Margaret" article and done a few more improvements and changed the "Margret" article to a redirect. --Diannaa (talk) 15:39, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Booking articles

I notice that the stacking-up of numerous articles (one with 8) is happening again, while not putting the { {GOCEinuse} } at articles' heads, apart from the fact that I thought this multiple booking was discouraged - I was almost in danger of an edit conflict. Acabashi (talk) 19:19, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Lowering Backlog goals to fit deadline

The goal of reducing the backlog by 10% (about 400 articles) seems to be too difficult, based on the late start of this Backlog elimination drive/July 2011, and newly-tagged articles are raising the total backlog count. I would like people to think towards a lower, more practical goal (such as: "Complete 300 articles from the 2010 backlog"). Plus, we should seek ways to ease the task. Some (many) of us did not start editing articles until the end of the 1st week, and copy-editing of these articles is just as hard as ever, especially since we are meeting (huge) machine-translations of articles from languages we just barely know, and re-translating is not "copy-editing" so that situation needs to be discounted. Hence, see below: "#Retagging of machine-translations". -Wikid77 05:02, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

The goal is not some hard target we absolutely have to reach. It's just a goal, a helpful guidepost to keep people motivated. Participation hasn't been as high this time as it has in other drives, but I don't think there's any need to change the official goal with only a few days left to go. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 12:52, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

We are on pace to meet about 75% of our target, and are keeping up with the requests page, so I don't agree with lowering the goal. Last July we had Jimbo Wales sign up, and had a successful drive, and the main reason his help was solicited was that SMasters was deeply concerned that we would not otherwise attract a lot of participants in the summer. He was right. However, those that have shown up have worked very hard. We're doing fine, and will do even better next drive, which will be in September. --Diannaa (talk) 23:16, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I think the target was reasonable. I must admit that my own goal was to do a good number of articles, regardless of the year they were tagged. In a few instances, I tried to do articles that were too difficult for me, for various reasons, and then I backed off and did others, instead. (See elsewhere on this page.) I am astonished that anyone could do hundreds of articles, however short or easy. This drive was a success, and the barnstars will be coming soon. --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:42, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Retagging of machine-translations

We need to just re-tag large machine-translation pages (trans-spam), as not being {Copyedit}, and move on to fixing real copy-edit pages. I am ready to replace {Copyedit} with the broader {Cleanup} for non-English text. It is too frustrating to be guessing the mangled phrases from "Google Translate" ("Google Mutate"), especially for editors with only limited knowlege of the other source language of an article. Plus, new editors, who do not realize the twisted horrors of machine-translation, might actually "imagine" that copy-editing could, somehow, fix all the warped, convoluted text in those articles. Instead, those articles need to be fairly re-tagged quickly, somehow, to get the much-needed inter-wiki attention (some day later).

I have just finished "de-mangling" the machine-translation of article "Thorame-Haute" from the French Wikipedia, with an attempted "197 changes" just to make it seem readable, but knowing that some French phrases should have remained quoted in the original French wording, and that needs to be done, someday. Plus, to my horror, the French-version page had been nicely updated (newer revisions), with clearer details, which probably would have translated with more clues to clearly reword English text (Google-trans of the new French would help fix the English). Meanwhile, the stats.grok.se have revealed the article is read only 1-to-3 times per day (~100 pageviews per month):

• http://stats.grok.se/en/201105/Thorame-Haute - pageviews for May 2011

There, I see no need to quickly "perfect" an article read less than 140 times per month. We see trends of that nature: a huge mangled article, which has remained hugely mangled because "no one" reads it, and it could just be re-tagged for correction by language-translation helpers. Trans-spam is not a true copy-edit problem, and it "steals" valuable edit time from fixing English articles which more people are actually reading. I say we should quickly re-tag those articles, as not {Copyedit} but {Cleanup} or such. -Wikid77 05:02, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

The eventual goal here is to copy edit every article with a tag, though I'd say we're probably at least a year away from that. Still, every tagged article, from the massive 20,000 word pieces, to the one paragraph blurbs about tiny villages in India, must eventually be done. People pick and choose which things they want to work on, of course, since it's all voluntary, and some people are more inclined towards and capable of working on translations from various languages. It's all part of the larger effort. If something isn't done right, someone else will eventually see it and re-tag it, and plenty of people see those types of difficult translated pages and skip over them.

I don't think trying to find and re-tag all translated articles is going to help very much. Like I said, some, though not many, English Wikipedia editors in the Guild are capable of doing that type of work. In my opinion, you should leave the copy edit tags, and just add the clean-up tags where you think they are needed. —Torchiest ^talk_edits 13:10, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Alternatively you could try suggesting it as a proposal for a GOCE project (similar to those on this page).

To do so, you would simply make the request for it to be considered on the co-ordinators page. I am not sure that it would be accepted as one, as I am not sure where the scope of copy-editing turns into Wikifying. There are many categories for pages requiring similar attention Category:Articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias Chaosdruid (talk) 16:16, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

P.S. I have posted on their talk page to see if they cover, or plan to cover, machine translated articles. I suspect the answer will be no though as most of the problems with those articles is their prose and grammar, something which is in GOCE's scope. Chaosdruid (talk) 16:28, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps this is an excuse to repeat the apochyryphal tale of the translating machine that was told to translate "out of sight, out of mind" into another language and then translate the result back into English; it offered up "invisible lunatic". The trouble with machine translations is not so much that they can't write nice, grammatical prose, but that they can't make sense of much of the input and then they spew out garbage output. Copyediting cannot solve this; only retranslation can.

I feel that, when an article is tagged with an inappropriate tag, asking for other than the most suitable action, then the right thing to do is change the tag to an appropriate one. I've never yet done this, but if I found a rubbish machine tranlation (and I've seen a fair few already in my short time here), I'd like to replace the {{copyedit}} tag with something like {{Rough translation}} or {{Cleanup-translation}} and be done with it (and not claim any article count or word count credits, of course). Articles written by humans with inadequate language skills to make themselves understood are harder, but even then it seems inappropriate to guess what the author meant during a plain copy-editing exercise.

My point: some {{copyedit}} tags steer an article away from what it really needs. It might be better not to hold ourselves to copyediting things that really need different treatment. --Stfg (talk) 18:25, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree with you, Stfg. Copy editor time is a valuable commodity; re-tagging is a good idea. Newly-tagged articles are more likely to be candidates for re-tagging for handling by methods other than copy edit. Some can be proposed for deletion; some are fairly obvious copy vios that qualify for speedy deletion; and some, like you say, need re-translation, not copy editing. I also agree with Wikid77; a seldom-viewed article deserves less care and attention than a high-profile article; and one on its way to a GA or FA nomination should get multiple passes, not just a cursory look. I have done lots of these, though, and will spend a lot more time on the ones that I think have an actual shot—an article will not pass its GA nomination if it is not properly sourced, so I will not spend as much valuable copy editor time on it as one that is likely to pass. --Diannaa (talk) 23:28, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

• Do some copy-edit then re-tag: I like those ideas, so I agree to compromise, by using a partial copy-edit, such as reword the top sections and obvious fixes, but then re-tag as either {{Rough translation}} (poor) or {{Cleanup-translation}} (almost done). I would allow a ce editor to claim the count of words in the fixed sections, then re-tag, rather than give the impression that Englishcizing text into "Spanglish" or "Frenchlish" is a valid copy-edit result. I have seen too many translations where some original-language words should remain in the English text: "Albert One-stone" is not a proper translation for "Albert Einstein" nor should "red mill" be put whenever "Moulin Rouge" is named. Typically, French experts know when the phrase, "The common one counts" actually means, "There are" (idiom). At some point, stop the copy-edit and then tag for re-translation. -Wikid77 18:22, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Right you are. I wouldn't want to copyedit any part that would be overwritten, but sometimes it's only some sections that need re-translation. Then we can use {{Rough translation-section}} and copyedit the rest. I found a case today in Kremlin Clock. Nice, because otherwise I'd have skipped over that article as "too difficult". --Stfg (talk) 10:41, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for mentioning {{tl|Rough translation-section}}, which is now on the Saul Ascher article that I attempted to copyedit. Also, I created Tamara Bach in English using Google's translation of the German article, and along with my limited German. Subsequent editors have substantially improved my stub class creation. I agree that GoCE is the place to discuss and sometimes copyedit machine translation articles, but in some cases maybe an AfD is the proper approach. Another approach is to mention the situation on the foreign language Wikipedia talk page. For myself, if I encounter such an article again, I will apply the Rough Translation tag, and go on to a different article. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:43, 2 August 2011 (UTC)