User talk:Daanschr/Archive 2008

WikiProject Recruitment

Hi Daanschr, you left me a message a while ago about recruitment for WikiProjects. Are you still involved in that, and can you give me more information? Thanks. SqlPac (talk) 17:15, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

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What do you like to do with this project?Daanschr (talk) 11:12, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Daanschr, I'd like to lay the groundwork to help get the databases project going strong. We have some people on the project, but there's this huge stockpile of neglected articles and unsourced stubs out there. And it seems so hard to get people interested in helping with articles. Right now my plan with this project is to try to get writers out there to at least look at some of these neglected articles. I'm thinking if people see an article in bad shape, especially one that's closely related to another article they are editing currently or have an interest in, they might be more likely to try to improve it. I don't have any kind of real basis for that, just a gut feeling. I'm just not sure how to get people to view those articles - I was kind of hoping that mentioning an article that needed attention on the talk page of another article being edited might help. What do you think? SqlPac (talk) 04:14, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I think there are two reasons that cause this problem. One is that people don't like to do the work and second is that it is volunteer work. There are several options to improve the number of participants.

An important factor is supporting social bonding. The problem is however that Wikipedia is too large for it. Social bonding works with small groups not with a giant institution like Wikipedia. Perhaps social bonding can be stimulated by starting certain traditions. We could have local clubs of Wikipedia, who meet once a week for real, in a pub for instance, and who jointly are active on the internet with specific tasks appointed to such a group. A group should be based at a certain place, like New York or Amsterdam, so people will have little effort to meet eachother. Of course, those who live in remote places can't join in such group activity, so we can also have virtual groups, but these will most likely be of less quality. Another option related to social bonding is to chat with people on personal issues, but that probably already happens.

What can be done is to stimulate new activities. Reading and discussing books to improve articles or something else that i can't think of. The importance of book reading is that people can stay interested. Each book on a topic is different from another. There is more interest in details than when people don't read books before editing. Editing as a group effort becomes a bureaucratic practise if it is only about trying to shape an article to a certain format or arranging articles.

Certain specific articles can be taken into account, but that already happens in WikiProjects, which have a tendency to fail.

Emergency efforts: Some pages can be willfully neglected due to a lack of participance to sort them. Unattended articles could get a new colour, more dark, to indicate that it is not of enough quality. The makers of these articles can than appeal to turn it into a normal article, thereby giving the responsibility for an article to the creator of it and not to someone who volunteers to improve articles.Daanschr (talk) 08:06, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Daanschr, Wikipedia is built on volunteer work, right? lol. Maybe a WikiProject to locate articles that are undergoing a flurry of activity and adding references to related articles that need attention? :) <g>

I like your ideas, but... I personally don't have time to try to "herd cats" offline :) I do live close to NYC, but like many other Wikipedians I honestly don't have a lot of time for offline social networking. I do think it would work wonders if something like that could be set up, but it seems like it would really be a full-time enterprise.

Reading and discussing books is good, and we get that to an extent on talk pages for these articles, since we're constantly scrutinizing references. Unfortunately that only occurs on the articles that are currently experiencing their "flurry" of activity at any given time. I've also tried picking articles at random to improve, hoping that it will show up on some interested people's watch lists.

I don't really understand the emergency efforts option. Not sure how "dark" you can make an article on "data marts" :) I have noticed that some articles that cross multiple WikiProjects seem to get a bit more attention. Like the data warehouse article, which is undergoing its flurry of activity now - it's in at least 2 projects. Don't know if that means anything or not. I think the main problem is that the articles we're taking on are just not sexy topics :( SqlPac (talk) 02:32, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

In the experiences that i had on Wikipedia, there was hardly any book discussion, so it sounds good that it does occur. I have less experience than you, i think. I guess you are right about the topics. Most of them won't get much attention. I am especially interested in history, since i have studied history. There was very little activity going on on history related articles, but history has an enormous scope of articles. Perhaps the main fault is the whole strucure of an online encyclopedia. It is too large to be controlled. And if it gets smaller, than it becomes unknown.Daanschr (talk) 08:04, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Idea: focusing on knowledge instead of articles. Some WikiProjects can focus on reading and discussing certain books, or discussing a certain theme, of which multiple articles relate to. Sorting stubs and turning articles into the right format can be performed during the editing process. In a trial and error process, it could be discovered which kind of activities lead to growth in participance.Daanschr (talk) 11:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not all that experienced - I've been around here for a while, but I just recently started working with WikiProjects. The main thing about the database project is that it's sort of a dry topic. A lot of people find it interesting and useful, but it's very academic in nature. Not a lot of sex and drama to make it more appealing to a mass audience. While we do discuss books on the talk pages, they're mostly academic and reference books, and we're usually focusing on details about technical minutiae; not very exciting for the casual reader or writer.

I think trial-and-error is probably the only way to figure out what works... I was kind of hoping someone had already done the trial-and-error part, and figured out some things that work. Ah well, back to the grind :) Thanks. SqlPac (talk) 14:13, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Council roll call

Hi there. You are receiveing this message because your name appears on the WikiProject Council participants list. The WikiProject Council is currently having a roll-call; if you are still interested in participating in the inter-project discussion forum that WT:COUNCIL has become, or you are interested in continuing to develop and maintain the WikiProject Guide or Directory, please visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Participants and remove the asterisk (*) from your name on the list of participants. If you are no longer interested in the Council, you need take no action: your name will be removed from the participants list on April 30 2008.

Melon‑Bot (STOP!) 22:14, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Merging Russian projects into one project - your input requested

Hi, you are receiving this message as you are a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Russian history. I have made a proposal to merge several Russian related projects into WP:RUSSIA. You can view the proposal at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Russian_history#Proposal_for_overhaul_and_creation_of_a_single_WP:RUSSIA_project. As a member of the Russian history project, your input is requested; so that all editors are reading off the same page please limit discussion to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Russia/Proposal. We all look forward to your input. --Russavia ^{Dialogue Stalk me} 10:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

World History

Erkan tells me you might be interested to look at this and that. I'll explain lateron, have to be off to real life. --Cethegus (talk) 18:40, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

When you look at Geschiedenis van de wereld (and even at History of the World) and compare it with World History you'll find that the latter article has more pictures, ie easier to understand and leads better to the numerous articles that deal with regional history and special problems. As the the Nederlands WP has got more articles than the Simple English WP it should be possible to create an article in Nederlands that does its job even better than that of Simple English WP. (It would be the same with en:WP, but their article is already rather good and I would not try to compete with that one.) In the de:WP the situation is rather similar: de:Weltgeschichte is not about Geschichte, but about de:Geschichtsschreibung. de:Menschheitsgeschichte is rather poor at the moment.

My plan is to use the structure of World History as I have done here and try to produce a text on world history that has the special articles of de:WP as basis. Therefore I asked Erkan and he suggested to ask you.

To be precise: It does not make sense to translate the article of Simple English, but one should aim at an article that is nearly as simple as that one and use all the links that one finds in World History and go to the parallel German and Nederlands articles and take them as basis articles that are extremely shortende to gain a text about all of world history. As this is a task that will take rather much time, I think, it will be more fun to do it together and - hopefully - to get others to join in.

Then you would add chapters in my German article and I would add chapters in your Nederlands article (Though I cannot write one sentence on my own, I think I'll have an idea what the main points are.) Then you correct the Dutch version, I correct the German one and so on. I'll copy the "Gliederung" now on my Nederlands page and you'll see what I mean. I hope it is clear enough now. The rest will be learning by doing. --Cethegus (talk) 10:59, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Please look here. --Cethegus (talk) 11:13, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia Weekly

Daan, your article on historic borders and your homepage were commented as 'find of the week' on last episode of Wikipedia Weekly, you might want to listen that. [1] Episode 65, about 10 minutes before the end, Greetings from Leiden :) Erik Zachte (talk) 07:29, 21 November 2008 (UTC)