The VG Project Collaboration of the Week is a new effort to improve important video game articles of low quality. Every week, an article is random selected by AnomieBOT from the Stub-, Start-, and C-class categories that are rated either High- or Top-importance. Such topics can offer a reader a good deal of encyclopedic information about video games, but are often too underdeveloped or lacking the proper level of writing and sourcing to accomplish this.
All editors are welcome and encouraged to participate by offering their insights and suggestions. Having a pool of different editors, both old and new, will help maximize improvements to the articles as well as our editing skills.
History
Collaborative efforts have come and gone within the VG project several times before. The first such effort, the "Gaming collaboration of the week", began in October 2004 as a result of the several otherweekly collaborations popping up on Wikipedia. It proved to be quite successful at improving articles to meet Wikipedia's standard at the time, but the effort eventually saw less and less participation. A second effort, the "Improvement Drive", began in August 2005 with the intent of improving articles to FA-quality. However, few nominations and articles were selected. The decline in participation in the collaborations and peer reviews resulted in a third effort. It began in February 2006 as a workshop, but never got off the ground.
Numerous discussions have taken place on at WT:VG to jump start collaborations and improve the process to prevent its decline again. While previous collaborations selected any video game article, most editors felt focus should be on video game topics more encyclopedic in nature—topics that are also generally in poor shape because of lack of attention. A common problem mentioned was that previous nomination processes were lengthy and hindered participation. The current idea to automate the process was brought up by JohnnyMrNinja, which was further discussed to iron out the details.
Current collaboration
The current collaborative efforts began in mid-January 2009, and several articles have been improved by editors. The random choice is intended to minimize the selection process, which allows editors to focus on article improvement. Improvements include better organization of content, massaging and copy editing the prose, removing excess non-free images, and much more. The random choice is also meant to encourage participation from editors of varying interest and help prevent burnout. If the present selection is not to your liking, wait until next week. Editors are encouraged to add Template:Collab-gaming to their watchlist to see which article is selected. Recently selected articles are:
