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WORK VIA WIKI
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Archive 10←Archive 12Archive 13Archive 14Archive 15Archive 16→Archive 20

This is the archive of discussions at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team from Nov 2006 to March 2007. Please don't add to discussions here.

If you are new to this page, please see the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/FAQs.


Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Work via WikiProjects discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions


Archives

IRC meeting

Walkerma asked me on my talk page whether we should have another IRC meeting or not. We haven't had one in a while, so here are the preliminary details:

Time
3:00 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time), 11-04-06 (23:00 UTC)

Channel: #wikipedia-1.0

Topics
A deadline, what to do next, list more here:
  1. A CVS or SVN repository for files related to the CD
    I would like the ability to select articles by category, with a top-up list of articles. Requirements should be the article dump, the category dump, and a script to pull the thumbnailed pictures (for articles) from the main server or the (huge) picture dump. Wizzy…☎ 09:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  2. Work Via Wikiprojects and the CD
  3. Looking for a publisher
  4. (If time) Use of MartinbotII to automagically generate article lists; see this, the results of the first Chem pilot run and subsequent results on other trials.
  5. A complete list for Work Via Wikiprojects, not separated by wikiproject
Attendees
  1. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:13, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
  2. Walkerma 17:58, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
  3. Kirill Lokshin 18:00, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
  4. +sj + 19:01, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
  5. Wizzy…☎ 09:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  6. Martinp23 12:03, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  7. Polimerek 23:25, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Discussion

Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:13, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Um, which day is it going to be? Titoxd(?!?) 01:14, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
That was fast! Oops! It is going to be this Saturday. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 01:16, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
It makes 22PM CET if I'm right, I will be there. I'm, in France, in contact with a software company. They plan to realease an demonstration ISO of a an offline-reader for the 14/11/06. It will be a XUL standalone application for windows, working with the last "SOS children village" HTML dump and integrating a self-made search engine. The engine will be able to deal with differents languages specs. They want to manage the publishing stuff themself. Kelson 08:22, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Can we just confirm that the time for this meeting is 6pm EST and 23:00 UTC? If so, Emmanuel will have to join us at midnight, not at 22:00 CET, I think. I'd like to contact a couple of other Europeans, so I want to make sure we have it right. Walkerma 16:02, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Followup from IRC

I have added more information to Walkerma's page at m:Static version tools to describe my process. All other input gratefully received. Wizzy…☎ 09:04, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! I see Emmanuel has posted something on the talk page there. Once the Polish group has got their DVD into production they may have time to share their scripts with us too. We need to make sure that every language doesn't have to write their own version of the same software! Walkerma 06:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

update

Hello

So, what's up with this project ? Where does it stand right now ? Can we help ? Anthere

Oh, certainly! Currently, we've selected the articles we are going to include in the test release, Version 0.5. However, we're working on the software (for the CD release), and we would appreciate finding a publisher (for the paper release). Titoxd(?!?) 22:14, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
If I'm not mistaken, a publisher would also (and perhaps primarily?) be appropriate for the CD release? I would think that pressed CDs/DVDs would be a much more attractive venture for one than actual paper printings of the material. Kirill Lokshin 23:27, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, mental mistake there. I guess it is because I am personally more excited about a printed release than a CD/DVD release, but that's just me... Titoxd(?!?) 01:26, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for dropping by, Anthere! If you listen to Episode 5 of Wikipedia Weekly, you can hear the latest (recorded early this morning). We have finished indeed reviewing articles (almost 2000) - last night, to be precise - and now we just need to get CDs produced. I agree with Kirill that we will probably just do a CD this time around, unless a paper publisher appears - but I would like to see us produce a paper edition later on. For software, we are hoping to use the contact Emmanuel has in Paris, we should know by Tuesday whether or not the demo of the offline reader has been successful. The Parisian company will also produce the CD for us - 30,000 copies were mentioned, but maybe that includes a future French release too! If anyone can find out about what software the Germans have (to share) that would be a great help - I've requested information several times from Mathias Schindler but heard nothing back so far. We have set up a place on meta to share software tools.
Tito and Kirill, you're most welcome to help us out! We need to compare the category listing (generated by talk page headers) against the listing on the V1.0 page. I have found that sometimes people added an article in one place but not the other. I hope that by Tuesday we can have a comprehensive list. Eyu100 has been producing a list here, but I'm not sure which source he is using. Let us know if you can help - the clock is ticking now! Walkerma 01:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok. I had a hack at the big list, and I tried to make it more usable for us. So we only have to strike out whatever is both on WP:V0.5 and is tagged on the talk page, right? Titoxd(?!?) 02:42, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't think we need to do any strikeouts, since we're dealing with complete lists. Thanks Tito! Actually, I found I was able to do this easily in AWB! I didn't realise this would work so easily. See Wikipedia:Version 0.5/biglist, this combines the category listing with any additional ones found on the Version 0.5 page (most differences came from pages that changed their names, or typos). The talk pages still need to be tagged - I'm very tired and need to go to bed soon. This only gives the article names, though, not the historical version. This week I'll go through the logs to see which articles have declined in assessment, and compare the versions - I'll try and note any articles where we should use the older version (I expect this only to be a handful). If you find anything different doing this job your way, let us know, Tito! Walkerma 04:38, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, there are some differences between the two lists we've generated, sadly. So, your list is from the category? Mine is from the listing, so that should be a pretty accurate depiction of what does not match... Titoxd(?!?) 04:52, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

(unindent) I've posted my "differences" list (generated by AWB list comparer) at User:Walkerma/Sandbox2. This represents the articles found on WP:V0.5 but not found in Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5. It is obvious that the WP:V0.5 list was not always updated after articles were tagged - AWB indicates 421 "missing" articles (though some of these are simply the different spellings I noted above). So I'm treating the category listing as the authentic one, and the V0.5 page simply as a place to catch a few missing ones. Walkerma 05:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I still think we need to be able to pull a list, as a query, from wikipedia. A page with the article list will quickly become unmanageable, and suffers from the standard problem of the same information (the list) in two different places. This is not just a 0.5 project - this is a process and pathfinder for 1.0, 1.1, a chemistry special, whatever. The category, or (better) a category of categories (Countries, Elements, Animals, Plants) and a top-up list to catch the others should be built. The information should be in one place. Wizzy…☎ 06:51, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

We do already have Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5 (which include all articles) and eleven subcategories such as History, Mathematics, etc. Will that suffice, or is there something else you think needs to be done? Walkerma 07:16, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
No - I think that is fine. I have not looked that closely, but I was trying to figure out how some articles (like countries and elements) got missed. Wizzy…☎ 10:07, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Also, I've added in the chemical elements. Apparently I missed poor terbium from the list - now added into the biglist. I've also gone through the "differences list, and tagged articles that weren't tagged before. Walkerma 07:16, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Just wondering what happened with Taiwan... if we leave it out, we're going to get accused of bias. Titoxd(?!?) 07:26, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
It's listed under Republic of China. I had no idea that there were two separate articles! I had spotted that there is a PR China article (about the present state) and a separate China article (about the entity with a rich history going back millenia), and I tagged both. I never thought Taiwan would have two articles. Do you think we need both? Walkerma 07:31, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I just checked {{0.5 nom}} and {{0.5 set nom}} since some that had been missed still carried one of these templates. I updated the held template and used that a bit, and removed the nomination tags from article talk pages. Walkerma 07:43, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
I have gone through all of Mathbot's logs for Version 0.5, looking for articles that declined in assessment rating, or were listed as removed from the listing. For the latter, I didn't find any that were permanently removed (except a handful added inappropriately) For the former I've created Wikipedia:Version 0.5/degraded article log, and I will look over these articles in the next couple of days to see whether the articles actually degraded or whether they were simply re-evaluated. If they did go noticably downhill I will tag an older version for inclusion. (Note: Chemists such as myself use the verb degrade as an intransitive verb, I hope that's OK!). Walkerma 08:02, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Initial responses on the French offline reader suggest that it may not be fully ready for use in Version 0.5, but it might perhaps be used in a later version. Does anyone have access to the German software & scripts? Walkerma 08:13, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Adding redirects into Version 0.5 and beyond

This has been raised as being an important issue to resolve. If we end up NOT using an offline reader (I'm still contacting people to try and find out about that!), how can we do this? Can someone who knows Javascripts (or whatever) please explain the various options in terms even a simpleton like me can understand? Thanks! Walkerma 15:45, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Opening the release version nominations? WP:WPRVN

We have a large review team, and currently they have nothing to do because Version 0.5 reviewing is done, so should we open up the release version nominations? There are still some things that need to be done, like ask Mathbot to keep track of articles, fix the design of WP:WPRV, etc. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 23:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, have been waiting for that for a long time and since I do not know much about the rest of the activity that there is to do (most of it is offline stuff now) I can't lend a hand anyway. I would like to nominate new pages and maybe help with the reviewing this time. Can a WP:0.7 version be created or something like that to organize such. Lincher 03:54, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes! Please go ahead! (Maybe we need to hear from one or two others, like Tito). I definitely think we should be working on this while Version 0.5 is coming out (I wanted to start it a while ago too!). For myself I will be quite tied up with V0.5, but later on I can help with reviewing. People I've spoken with seem to be happy to call this next release Version 0.7, and to use this to expand things from Version 0.5, should we go for that? The idea of the "Release Versions" page was that it could be a rolling page for whatever is the current version, so we have one standard link where people can nominate things. Once a version nomination closes, the list would be transferred off that page, then the page re-opened for whatever is the next version. Do you think that could work? Meanwhile we can get User:MartinbotII up and running to get ready for a bigger release pulled from the Mathbot data.
As for the approach used, I think we should open that up for discussion. Eyu100, will you be taking the helm for this version? If so, perhaps you could give us your views on the release to kick things off? Walkerma 04:27, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmm. How are we going to open it if the format we're going to use is still up in the air? I would think it would be better to figure out which one we're going to use before making that decision... Titoxd(?!?) 06:13, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
OK, let's agree on that in the next day or two so we can get started ASAP? Since we haven't heard from eyu100, I'll start the ball rolling. Let's do the following:
  • Have general nominations and set nominations as with Version 0.5, reviewed as before.
  • Set up review pages for WP:GAs, WP:VAs, the core supplement, plus a cities page listing all cities listed at List of cities by population, List of metropolitan areas by population and all capital cities of the world (as listed here, but limited just to sovereign nations). I'd also like to see a states & provinces page covering Australia, Canada, USA, India, South Africa, China and perhaps Germany and some Anglophone countries I've missed (but UK counties, French departments etc are a bit small for this release, IMHO). If someone has the time, we should probably also set up an FA review page for FAs not covered by V0.5 (new or not reviewed).
  • Set up a Todo page.
  • Contact all members of the review team announcing the new project.
  • Close the nominations on (say) March 31, 2007 and aim to close all reviews by May 31, 2007.
Also see my comments in the "perfecting V0.5" discussion below. What do others think - eyu100, Tito, Lincher, .....? Walkerma 07:35, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
This idea sounds good, I have created a basic To do list at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations/To do where everything is red link but everything can be copied from the V0.5 pages. If there are missing things, please fill in the gaps. If you feel I wasn't precise enough, change the wording. Also, everypage is a subpage of Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations which will remove any confusion and be helpful for going back to the nomination page.
I had a question ... are the articles from V0.5 automatically in or not, and that is the reason for the Version 0.5 review page I have created in order to do a quick review of V0.5, maybe at the end of the V0.7 or so.
For everything else, I say let's get the ball rolling. Lincher 15:52, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Should everything from Version 0.5 be included? I'd say yes, I'm pretty happy with the content of V0.5, and we want to build on that. I'd like to hear what eyu100 thinks on this issue, but I have the impression he's said the same thing. I'm checking the delisted FAs (and other articles that have been downgraded) in V0.5 myself this weekend, but I don't expect to remove any from the list - at worst, if the article really has gone downhill (rare) we'll use the originally-reviewed version.
We also need to think about templates. I'd like to have a Release Version template that works like {{V0.5}}, but also (assuming we're keeping all of V0.5) change the {{V0.5}} to say "This article is in Version 0.7 and 0.5" - that way we avoid cluttering up talk pages with lots of templates (and annoying people who we need to help us!). I think we should give eyu100 and Tito a chance to comment before we open things up, but then let's get things under way. Thanks for your input and for setting up those pages! Cheers, Walkerma 17:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, by default everything is v0.5 should be included into Version 0.7. However, I am still not sure about this method. The part about v0.5 that really annoyed me was that there were so many subpages, that some of them I didn't even know existed until the list below was made. As for the reviewing, I agree, we should start soon, but at the same time, we need to be sure that we're not doing the same mistakes in v0.5. So, the question becomes, "Which mistakes did we do that we don't want to do again?" I'd hold until we get some answers to that question. Titoxd(?!?) 20:47, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
To Walkerma: Yes, I will be coordinating the release version (unless many people object). I think we should open this after we get all the templates set up. I'm changing the V0.5 template if it hasn't been changed already to use one box instead of two. How much progress is being made at WP:WVWP? There should be a final list for MartinbotII to run through after most of the important Wikiprojects are contacted. How many articles should there be? I'll wait for Tito's reply and then open up the nominations. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 20:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Just make sure you include the other category, not just Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5, in the template, and feel free to nuke the other box. Titoxd(?!?) 20:47, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Sorry I've been rather away this weekend (normally my most active time), I've been rather sick. In reply to Tito's question "Which mistakes did we do that we don't want to do again?", I think I've pretty much answered that question in the section below where Lincher in effect asked the same question and raised the same issues. I've copied that answer here - does this address your concerns?
I would suggest the following for Version 0.7:
  • Limit the discussions to the talk pages of Wikipedia:Release Version and Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations, with more global issues discussed here.
  • Plan what review pages we intend to use, and set up redirects from their talk pages when we create them. Update the navigation template, or design a new one, including all the review pages and the Todo page. Remove old redundant pages (such as Version 0.5) from this template.
  • Set up a Todo page from the start, possibly with its own talk page or possibly using the main Release Version talk page. (Lincher has done this already)
Besides the three main pages listed above, the other proposed sub-pages are: Set Nominations, GA Review, Vital articles/Core supplement review, Cities review, States & provinces review. Would this set be OK? These could all fit comfortably into the navigation template.
Regarding eyu100's questions - if we used the above dates as a guide, I think 4000 articles is fairly achievable, though it depends somewhat on how many active reviewers we have (I'd personally like to do some other wikiwork - I did little but reviewing for two months). Are you OK with the other proposals, eyu100? I hope to revive contacting WikiProjects at WVWP soon, but of course the Mathbot side of WVWP continues to grow at an amazing rate. One problem is that coverage is still patchy - one US state will copy what another state is doing, but the people who do Fine Arts or Dance are either unaware of assessments or not focused enough to participate. I think we should have a broad enough coverage by next summer to give MartinbotII a suitable range of articles to draw from, so we can aim from a bot-derived article selection then IMHO.
So, are we ready now? If not, can you suggest (a) what other mistakes I'm ignoring (I'm sure there are some!) and (b) what we can do to avoid them this time around? Thanks, Walkerma 03:26, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, you pretty much covered everything. What I would do is to get rid of all the 0.5 stuff and put into a separate navigation template, then on the main {{Wikipedia 1.0 Navigation}}, link to both that template and a new, v0.7 template for the new pages. I'd also like to know what the importance criteria are going to be this time around; they cannot be as strict as 0.5's, but since it qualifies again as a test release, there's still some restrictions on it, I would think. If the opposite is true, and we're making quality assessments only, then keeping an eye on FAC and GAN would be a good idea, as well. Just those questions, but otherwise, we're good to go. Titoxd(?!?) 07:08, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
My opinion on the importance criterion would be to have almost all core subjects, the Vital articles plus High articles (maybe the best from every Project from Mathbot's listing) and the necessary Mid quality that can be linked in some way or another to the other High and Core so we build a network of articles that can be linked from one another.
Also, I will soon make bulk nominations of articles that are High quality/Top or High importance from the various wikiprojects and with that we will go on. Lincher 18:08, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Overview of what V0.5 was/Things to perfect

After standing aside and letting you guys work on Version 0.5 (since I jumped in late and wasn't able to help you guys too much), I can only point to the few things that didn't let me take part of the process :

  • The discussion wasn't centralized : in fact, everything should be redirected to the talk page of WP:1 in order to help the noobs (like me) find their way into the project.
  • There should be a Todo list that is linked from the WP:1 page (the one that was available, you had to know where it was).
  • The architecture is overwhelming. Just having a better architecture of what are the different pages used for the reviewing and a clear master list on the WP:1 page too would help the newcomers. Also, what is necessary is to archive the present Version 0.5 subpages. Here is the complete list (I didn't catch what is on the users subpages) :

I hope that this help the WP0.5 people that are doing a marvelous job as of now. I just wanted to give a few pointers of what could be done to have a better approach toward doing the next release version. Lincher 13:48, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Great commentary! (And polite, too - thanks for that!) It's good to see the view of someone who hasn't been so close to the project as I have. We did talk about consolidating talk pages early on, but it would've been difficult to do at that point. I disagree that things should be discussed here - at some stages we would have been archiving every couple of days. With hindsight I'd rather have seen things were discussed at Talk, with (perhaps) other talk pages allowed at Talk and Talk. The reason for all this is of course that we changed mid-project from a single nomination page to multiple nomination/strikeout pages; this fresh approach turned out to be pivotal in getting the job done, but a side-effect was the generation of all of these new pages. The Set Nominations subpages were all transcluded onto one page (and an archive after review), so that situation is not as bad as it might seem from the above. For archiving these, I'm open to suggestions - the set nom pages are already archived, though.
Before we started created the navigation template seen at the top of this page - that was expected to show all the pages we would have! We added some of them in as they were created, but this became difficult. Once I found myself reviewing mostly by myself or with eyu100, I gave up on editing the template! The Todo list was only created quite recently, that's why it never got included. I was asked by JoeSmack in September to create a project map for the whole of the 1.0 project (not just 0.5), and I quickly realised that would take me some time - time I couldn't afford to take away from reviewing! ([[WP:WVWP has a labyrinth of pages too!) One of my New Year projects is to do this. Bear in mind that 15 months ago there were only two pages associated with the Wikipedia 1.0 project - so naturally still finding our way.
For Version 0.7, we will probably want a set of similar pages, such as strikeout pages for vital articles and good articles, and perhaps capital cities too. We will probably want a set nominations page again. Since we are not quite so much in pioneer country any more, things are hopefully much more predictable - so we can probably get the navigation system set up now. Based on your comments I would suggest the following for Version 0.7:
  • Limit the discussions to the talk pages of Wikipedia:Release Version and Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations, with more global issues discussed here.
  • Plan what review pages we intend to use, and set up redirects from their talk pages when we create them. Update the navigation template, or design a new one, including all the review pages and the Todo page. Remove old redundant pages (such as Version 0.5) from this template.
  • Set up a Todo page from the start, possibly with its own talk page or possibly using the main Release Version talk page.
Thanks for your work and for sharing your ideas. I hope you can be involved with reviewing for Version 0.7! Walkerma 07:15, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe for the archiving, it could work like this :
Version 0.5 stays as it is, Release version exists until release and then it is dumped onto Version 0.7 pages. Then, Release version becomes the next version ... 1.0, which will reside on the Release version pages and then be dumped onto Version 1.0, what do you think? Lincher 15:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
That's the plan - that way people can make permanent links to "Whatever is the current version," and these will stay the same through all the versions. Walkerma 17:24, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

V0.7 launch

Things to do, things that have been done (don't start a new thread, just continue the list) :

Also, some one has created {{Releaseversion nom}} and {{Releaseversion}} which is a copy of {{0.7 nom}} and {{0.7 set nom}} and {{V0.7}}. I do not know which one is the best to use, the only thing I know is if we go from using 0.5 to release version that will mess people up. Although if we stick with V0.5 to V0.7, people will know we have just switched version and we are now doing a new batch of reviewing. Also, since everything will fall under V0.7 later, when we archive, changing the templates will be tedious and so just having the 0.7 template will make the release versions' archival roll faster. Lincher 19:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Poke someone at meta, probably Delphine, if you want to have a foundation-based logo, or Essjay, who designed the 0.5 logo we currently use. Titoxd(?!?) 05:19, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
We can use the release version pages and then move all the articles to a V0.7 pages when we are done to avoid template changing once we get to the next version. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 14:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok then, so {{Releaseversion nom}} will be used for nominating articles and {{Releaseversion}} for reviewed articles for now. Later we will change the templates to {{V0.7}} as the WP:WPRV will end. Lincher 15:18, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I was asked to put together a logo matching the one I did for .5, but with .7 as the text; I have done so, as shown above. Essjay (Talk) 02:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Review question

First, do we need to know the subject to review it? Do we need to fact check the statements (or everything)??? After readint through and finding errors, if minor we correct them? If major, we reject the nomination? Those questions are to be in sync with you guys' reviewing. Lincher 04:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

At this point, reviewers can't be expected to know everything about everything - though by all means focus on areas you know better. There are some things that are relatively easy - how well referenced the article is, the quality of the English, the thing is plastered with POV tags (though with articles like Islam that's kinda inevitable!), layout (headings, pictures). If you know the field at all you can probably judge if the article is reasonably complete or not. With some standard types of articles like cities (or biographies) there are some standard headings (for cities such as Dallas, Texas there are history, culture/tourism, demographics, politics/administration, geography, transport, possibly education), this makes it easy when you are reviewing hundreds of similar articles! I'd say that if it falls outside the "must-have-if-at-all-possible" area (Core/Vital articles etc) then usually a decent B-Class is the minimum standard we accept, unless it's an important article in a set nomination. I'll write up an FAQ on this once my job and Version 0.5 let me have the time. Walkerma 06:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I meant to say - if it's an area I'm familiar with I take about 5 minutes per article (obviously I don't read the whole thing in that case, just selections). If it's an area I don't know well it'll be longer. Whether I fix things (or leave comments on the talk page) depends on whether or not I have the time, though I have probably done this on several hundred that I've looked at. Some might say a more thorough review should be done, but if we'd all done that, our release would consist mostly of 500 FAs on mainly obscure topics! Walkerma 06:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the succinct and very informative answer. Lincher 13:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Names of releases, filenames

Those interested in how the releases are to be named, please see Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Torrent_Project#More_informative_file_names (and the section above that) and comment. Paleorthid has some excellent suggestions, IMHO. Walkerma 07:33, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Time span of reviewing

We now need to decide on a date when we end the nomination process and also decide when we start planning for the actual release of the V0.7 (release version). Lincher 15:29, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Up above I suggested "Close the nominations on (say) March 31, 2007 and aim to close all reviews by May 31, 2007." No one has objected to that - does that mean everyone has agreed to that? I think it's a little up in the air because we don't know how the bot assessment scheme will go, but perhaps we can use it as a goal? Walkerma 21:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Evaluating 0.5

Given that we've basically finished with 0.5, I think now would be a good time to make a few comments on how successful the effort was. A number of these will be rather harshly critical; I apologize in advance to anyone whom I offend here.

In January 2006, a CD selection of Wikipedia was released, containing 2000 articles. Now, after almost a year of effort, including massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects, we've collected, for 0.5, a grand total of... 1960 articles! (Give or take a few; I'm not entirely sure of how accurate the bot count is at the moment.) To make matters worse, most of these came from already existing listings (the FA list and the various core topics lists), rather than being spontaneous nominations.

Much of this apparent lack of progress can be attributed to the fact that it was meant to be a "test release", of course. But it was my understanding, in any case, that the crude methods adopted were directly linked to that; in other words, that our Byzantine way of choosing articles was a function of the tight schedule and the newness of the program, and would be abandoned once we had something more effective. Instead, it seems that 0.7 is going to institutionalize "slow and miniscule" as the model that Wikipedia releases are going to follow, and "arbitrarily complicated" as the method for getting articles into them. Quite frankly, I don't see the point, when far more efficient (if somewhat less artificially controlled) means are now readily available. Kirill Lokshin 22:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

2 things to start off from, the difference between both release is that one was hand picked and barely looked over (The first WPCD release). The second was also hand picked but were from lists that contained long articles and they were man-assessed.
On another note, the 0.7 will probably go faster in that we will pick articles directly from the Index that Mathbot creates. Also, there will be more reviewers (I think there were 4 at the max, 1 at the lowest for the first release).
Also, we know things were dispersed and tough to get to, which means stick to 1 place for, the todo list and the discussions will also be merged and redirected so we don't dilute the information.
Lastly, now that we are on the roll, it will go mucho fasto this time around.
Aside, for you Kirill, feel free to dump bulk of articles onto the nomination page, I'm waiting to get some to review some (other that the ones I nominated). Lincher 22:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Lincher here. I think "almost a year of effort, including massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects" is true of Wikipedia 1.0 as a whole, as we gear up for full-blown versions. But for Version 0.5 most of the work on Version 0.5 was done by a handful of people, and the project ran for six months. My goal at the start was to have around 2000 articles by October, and instead we have 1960 articles by November - I'm OK with that. There are several reasons why this was perfectly reasonably with Version 0.5:
  1. We had to produce a product a reasonable time, to show we could deliver, especially given the history of the English 1.0 project (several years of talk, but no progress at all towards an actual product). Relying on bot assessments to compile a CD would have been silly in May 2006, when we had only about 5000 articles listed (many from MILHIST!).
  2. As I see it, and I think some others in the project feel the same, it is necessary for us to have a solid core of articles giving us a foundation for larger releases. I accept that probably at least 500 articles in the release are FAs that are more "fluff" in terms of importance, but the remaining 1500 are a good start. We can't use bot assessments alone, or we will end up with a non-representative selection.
  3. Don't underestimate what 1960 articles represents - it represents a set of books totalling perhaps 8000 pages with perhaps 8000 pictures - equivalent to 0.5 metres of shelf space. It represents soemthing 10% of the size of World Book, which has taken almost 90 years to reach 18,000 articles - albeit with much better fact-checking than we have.
  4. The January 2006 release represented a lot of work, too, as it used the same methods as we did to manually check articles. Like us, they used lists like the GA list. It was a great start, but that work was not done within the Wikipedia community, so it couldn't easily be used here. With the articles being hand-picked, it represented topics relevant to the charity concerned (such as Africa), but this was not a solid base from which to build our releases - for example Port Louis and Bissau are included, but Rome and Athens are not.
  5. We represent the main language of the world's #1 online information source. The whole world is watching us. If we produce a large DVD that is poorly done, it will be ridiculed in the late night talk shows in the US, and in satire in the UK. If we take a more conservative route to produce a more solid product it may take longer, but instead the media will either ignore it or hail it as a challenge to Britannica.
  6. Just today I have been involved in negotiations to set up a publishing deal that will help us build a relationship ready for larger releases next year. Do you think I could have done that if I didn't have a test set of articles? Any more than my old indie pop band in England could have got a gig without a demo tape of 4 songs?
That work must continue - that's why Version 0.7 is needed. As I understand it, the plans are for a hybrid, allowing us to make progress as we did on 0.5 while evaluating new automated systems such as MartinbotII. If we used our automated systems alone, we would produce an article selection strong in Military History, Physical Sciences and pop culture but very weak in Fine Arts, the business world and Social Sciences. We're just not ready to go completely over to automation. My impression from Version 0.5 is that for the long term we will want to have around 5000 articles that are on a broad range of key topics. Some of that will come from WikiProject bot assessments sifting through importance data, some of it via more traditional tables from WVWP, but much of it will have to be found using the methods of Version 0.5. And it's not as if we didn't learn anything - things like the Set Nominations system allowed us to add some things (such as the 117 chemical elements) very rapidly - so the next 1000 will be much less work than the first 1000. Note that essentially two reviewers managed to cover 500 articles between them in the last month or so. I actually think that many of your criticisms relate to how things worked near the start, rather than near the end of V0.5. Also, if you know of any methods that are even better than those we are using, please tell us!
I also happen to think that even in five years time when we have bots running most things, we will still want to have open nominations - this approach provides a place for anyone to say, "This is good, you should include it." In terms of direct article numbers it actually has little effect (as you point out), and so it takes up a small proportion of reviewers' time, but it ensures that the community can have a direct voice in what we do, and can help open up whole new subject areas.
In a routine email today, I estimated that we could produce a release of 10,000-20,000 by next fall, most of which would be both (a) important topics and (b) good quality articles. It will provide the basis for solid releases on CD, DVD and paper for many years to come. It will give us a product which we can be proud of - something Jimbo can happily wave in front of TV cameras (as he has done with the German releases). Something like that would have seemed miraculous even one year ago. I think that by this time next year people will see that the "massive contributions from hundreds of Wikipedians and the involvement of scores of WikiProjects" have all been worthwhile. Walkerma 07:12, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
There are still two main problems, to my mind, with the approach we're taking.
  • First, we're persistently going for the quick-and-dirty fix rather than the version that makes sense in the long run, even though we're not constrained by the schedule. For example, the discussion of a separate nomination area for capital cities could be replaced with "get WikiProject Cities to start assessments". Bot assessments may not solve everything, but they scale much better than any centralized review process. The same can be said for our other gaps in coverage; rather than relying on auxiliary centralized reviews to bring them in, why not push the WikiProjects that cover them to provide the articles directly?
  • Second, too much effort is being devoted to keeping things out of the release rather than putting them in. A simple strategy of ORing off high quality/importance articles from the bot lists and then going through the resulting list (not to do a comprehensive review, but merely to catch anything truly trivial) would be both faster than trying to collect the same coverage by hand, and produce much larger releases than what we have now. There is no need, in my opinion, for any absurdly complicated processing of the bot lists; our strategy should be to release all the important stuff and anything else that's useful, not all the important stuff and nothing else. (The world will not suddenly hate Wikipedia if, by some chance, Spoo slips into a release version, in any case; for a sufficiently large set of articles in total, nobody will care about the incidental trivia.)
We could very easily have 20,000 articles to work with right now. They wouldn't cover everything that we ought to have, granted, and so we'd still need to add more; but what real benefit are we getting from systematically excluding usable material from the releases because it exceeds "the quota" for some particular topic? Kirill Lokshin 11:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Kirill brings up good points, although I'm not sure that we can actually do anything about them. For example, we cannot force WikiProject Cities to begin assessing articles if it isn't a priority for them. We can suggest, but I'm not sure that pushing WikiProjects is the method we want to take here.
As for what approach we should take? We need to make sure we publish everything that passes a certain criteria of importance (e.g. all capital cities of the world, for example) and then, when we know we've covered pretty much everything about that, to begin adding "fluff". If I understood correctly, that's the method that's going to be taken: we will obtain our lists from the assessment tables of different WikiProjects, then we will do a quick double-check for quality. More eyes are better than fewer eyes.
However, that said, I'm not a fan of the method we're using right now either, but I think it would be better if we changed it gradually, instead of outright, as that will allow us to fall back on the old method if the new one doesn't work for some reason. We do need to change it sooner or later, though. For v0.5, it worked, though. Why? Because as Martin said, we needed to have something to show. Martin indicated about the importance of having it when bargaining with a publisher, but when we do publish something, no matter how small the release, many more folks inside the Wikipedia community will come to help us, because they will think, "Oh, so it's not like last time. This time, they were serious." Titoxd(?!?) 16:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Based on the work being done at WP:COUNCIL, "pushing" a WikiProject to start doing assessments is usually trivial; you just have to ask the correct question. The old WVWP-style messages ("Could you somehow come up with some articles...?") aren't particularly useful in this regard; many projects admittedly don't have the time or the technical knowledge to set up an assessment system. A more specific request ("Here's the new assessment system; would you like us to help you set it up for your project?") typically works much better; there are extremely few projects that actually object to doing assessments in principle. (As a bonus, setting up the assessment code in a project banner that's already in use feeds a lot of articles into the unassessed backlog; it might take us a while to go through them, but once they're "in the system", they can easily be used for releases.) Kirill Lokshin 16:31, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the above comments - these are certainly worth considering. I think part of the disagreement here is the choice between content balance (which I emphasise) and content size (which Kirill emphasises). Maybe I'm being too conservative in that area - but I think Version 0.7 (as a hybrid approach) can allow us to go the way Kirill suggests if things take off that way. I have liked reviewing the most important topics ourselves, to give us some degree of control over our content, but with things like the top 200 biographies we relied on the Biographies WikiProject to give us a list. Speaking personally, I'm very happy to work with an active project like Biographies or Military History, but if a project is pretty dead then I'm more reluctant to rely on it.
I'm wondering if (once MartinbotII is past the pilot stage) maybe we should consider teaming up WP:WVWP and WP:COUNCIL with WP:V0.7 to coordinate this work? In other words, Version 0.7 says "We'd like to get 1000 Arts articles" and the other two groups get to work on this, via some mutually agreed method. That way we can test the bot-based article compilation, but if things fail we can still plod through articles as we have been. If Kirill is right - and I grant that he may be, we could perhaps get 10,000 articles for Version 0.7 while maintaining content balance. Then we're all happy! Could this work? Walkerma 04:04, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I thought I'd chime in a bit at this point and say I vastly prefer balance to size. Wikipedia currently is experiencing growing pains; Jimbo himself said to knock it off with the size celebrations (1.5 mil articles soon, woOt) and to get down to quality. Wikipedia hasn't been around for a relatively long amount of time (think of how long AIM and forums have been around), yet think of how this form of knowledge and communication will be the 'it's always been there' 5 years down the line. In the long run, doing it right is better than lookin' large (and hey, size comes anyhow, balance is what takes work). Just my 2 cents. JoeSmack Talk 17:47, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Look at the section below and comment there if you are interested in teaming up WVWP and V0.7. It has ideas on how to "fix" the importance ratings given by Wikiprojects. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 15:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Progress on Work Via Wikiprojects

I posted this here because this involves the release version too. How much progress is being made on WVWP? Would it be possible to put some articles (i.e. more than 1000) in the release version if the bot had a lost of articles to go through? We definitely need more than a couple thousand more articles for this version, and this will also give the project something to do besides get article information (which is useless by itself). The rating scale can be improved slightly...

Each Wikiproject gives quality information, which is probably pretty accurate. However, the importance ratings are relative to the Wikiproject (i.e. WikiProject Dallas would probably give Dallas a Top-class rating, but its importance for the release version would probably be Mid-class. This could be partially "fixed" by rating the projects on their relative importance (generally, projects on broader subjects' important articles are more important than important articles of projects about TV shows, for example).

What do you think about this idea? Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 04:16, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I would love to do something like this - this is something we can get MartinbotII to do. One reason I want someone else to be coordinating 0.7 is precisely because I want to get back to work on WVWP. Before I got involved with 0.5, WVWP was the main focus of my efforts. IMHO, this project is grossly undervalued by the community - it helped projects to start talking together, it helped get projects started with assessments, it set up the bot assessment scheme, and it will ultimately be the source (via bot assessments) of . And yet currently there is no one actively doing things there. Compared to projects like WP:GA and WP:FA it requires very little work - a couple of people can really work wonders there. It's very much like the Parable of the Sower - much falls on stony ground, etc, but the seeds that grow allow us to reap great rewards.
Regarding importance criteria, I think it will be necessary to set up a formula to allow for that. Ideas on how to do that just crystallised for me earlier tonight - interesting you should ask about it now! I plan to adapt eyu100's original algorithm for this purpose. We will be able to compensate for (a) project importance level (e.g., USA vs. Texas vs. Dallas) and (b) assessment practices at the project concerned (e.g., depending whether they have 1 or 100 "top"). The latter isn't a problem now, but I can predict a few projects trying to cram lots of their articles into our releases if there isn't a check built in from the start. (By the way, overall I'd put Dallas in the "High" importance category myself, as it's a global city!) When the formulae are available I will ask for feedback. I will aim to start providing lists of key articles for Version 0.7 via MartinbotII by some time in January, which should give plenty of data by March. Is this OK? Walkerma 07:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this is fine. What should the project importance scale be? Here is an idea:
  • 2.2, world in general (if there is one)
  • 2, continents
  • 1.9, regional blocs like the European Union
  • 1.8, major countries (top fifth percentile GDP)
  • 1.8, science, history, arts, entertainment, etc. (general projects)
  • 1.6, moderately important countries (40th-80th percentile GDP or bigger than and including Iraq)
  • 1.3, minor countries (everything else larger than and including Andorra
  • 1, global cities
  • 0.9, each area of science, history, sports, etc. (major, i.e. Chemistry or Football) (definition of major? >=90,000,000 Google hits?)
  • 0.8, each area of everyday life (major, i.e. Train or Trees, singular, >150 million Google hits)
  • 0.7, each area of science, history, sports, etc. (minor, i.e. Developmental psychology, everything not major)
  • 0.7, tiny countries like Monaco and major cities (1,000,000+ population or a global city, debatable)
  • 0.5, TV shows (major, >=12,500,000 Google hits, after searching for MythBusters, Oprah, and CNN)
  • 0.4, minor cities (not major)
  • 0.2, TV shows (minor, i.e. not major)
The importance of a Wikiproject's articles would be multiplied by its importance rating to get the final rating. These numbers could be tweaked a bit, though. Feel free to edit it without posting a new message. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 16:05, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

That's roughly the sort of thing I had in mind, though I was planning on basing it more on a hierarchy system. There are very detailed "trees" of knowledge produced by professionals in the encyclopedia/library/information science world, and I think I'd like to base the scheme on something like that. Of course these things aren't black & white (e.g., how do you define "minor?"), and people will disagree about relative importance (e.g., I would rank chemistry as equal in importance to the whole of sport - one as a major area of science, one as a major area of recreation). Once I get a rough draft we can debate the details in the usual wiki-fashion until we reach a consensus. Thanks, Walkerma 03:45, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I added more objective criteria to reduce debate. Importance in this case is defined by Google hits (i.e. roughly how many people know about it). Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:19, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I also created a page for rating the importance of projects at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects/Importance because we will need to rate them sometime. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:23, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm not following this at all. I don't see how all of Wikipedia's articlespace can be sensibly divvied up into geographical importance ratings, with a few oddly tacked on for TV shows. I also don't see how the importance of the Wikiproject's topic can be used to determine abosolutely the importance of articles rated under it. If Baseball was rated as Mid-importance this does not mean that the biography of Babe Ruth isn't Top importance for 1.0 purposes. It's simply not that easy. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:17, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Tagging decent versions of articles

UPDATE: I have checked all of the articles that have been downgraded, as listed at Wikipedia:Version 0.5/degraded article log, and I think we can use recent versions of all of them. I basically fixed the major problems, but generally the "decline" was due to re-evaluation rather than anything else.

So now we can move forward- we need to pull out a decent version of each article. If I'm correct the Germans and Poles did this by getting a "whitelist" of approved editors, then looking for the most recent version by a whitelisted editor. We don't have such a whitelist, and I wasn't planning on writing one, though we may end up with one if Stable Version materialise. Could someone write a script that could find the most recent version by an editor who (a) has a username and (b) has set up a user page for themselves? I would think that would screen out 99% of the vandalised versions. Any thoughts, or offers to help? Walkerma 07:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

V0.5 just a comment

I will only suggest a minor addition to that version since I don't know when it'll get out or such. It would be ideal to have the class tags added to the articles and the Assessment page in order to let people know that what they are looking at is of "that" quality according to standard requirements. Also, if it is possible, have a link to tell the CD users that the actual/non-stable version of such or such article is available at "that place" and that we would appreciate any help in getting this article better for the next release version. Lincher 15:42, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Stablepedia

I've created a Stable-Wikipedia miniproject at User:Messedrocker/Stablepedia where individual article revisions that best reflect the four requirements of being accurate/sourced, neutral, clarity, and grammar (such as a featured article just after passing FAC) are listed. If your WikiProject comes up with specific article revisions, be sure to post them there -- follow the instructions. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 23:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Why is this project in user space? —Doug Bell talk 07:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    I started this project as a little project of mine, however by the looks of it, it might just end up as part of WP 1.0. We'll have to play it by ear. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 14:18, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
  • More to the point, why does this project exist? Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Wikipedia itself stable? Also, just about every WikiProject considers these four requirements when a new article is written (that includes the Editorial Team). This "miniproject" seems a waste of time, if you ask me. (Of course, this is my opinion; if I've broken any rules in voicing it, please freely delete this comment.) --JB Adder | Talk 12:43, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    Wikipedia isn't stable - all articles get changed from time to time. The idea of a stable wikipedia is that you can trust the articles you're reading not to have been recently vandalised, etc. However, there are already lots of schemes working towards various ideas of a stable wikipedia - this very page is part of one of them. There is no point making a new one. --Tango 13:07, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
    Indeed, Wikipedia is not stable. However, this is more of a quality-assurance; a way to make sure the article you're reading has been checked for errors and the like. While articles may start up with all the goodness that my little project requires, quality can get lost over time. And I understand that this is one project trying to help — consider it a supplement, or the total list of everything, of WP 1.0. ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 14:18, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Your miniproject is clumsy. Please just consult WP:1.0 editorial team. I urge no one else to waste time contributing until his idea has been discussed and, reaching a positive consensus, is enacted in the WIKIPEDIA namespace. --Alfakim-- talk 16:35, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I would like to wait and see the results of the testing of stable versions in the German Wikipedia. At Wikimania it was announced that if the system can be made to work there, it would come to the English Wikipedia (and others too) as official policy supported by the Wikimedia software, as described here and this. Also see WP:STABLE. Walkerma 20:03, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I am aware of these efforts. I am also aware that large scale software improvements such as the Quality Assurance plugin take a long time to implement. We all know about Single User Login, don't we? We can't wait for technical improvements in the distant future when we can do it now (albeit less slick). ★TWO YEARS OF MESSEDROCKER★ 20:16, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Alfakim, the vast majority of projects start on userspace, so don't try to knock it down. Usually, telling others how not to waste their time is a good way to waste yours. I see no reason for Messedrocker to not keep working on it to give us "trial" data, although we could probably modify Mathbot's tables to include &prev=cur to provide us with a diff. Still, I think it is a good idea. Titoxd(?!?) 22:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I concur, good idea and well planed (also, different from the other ones that died in the egg). It would even be nice to pick these articles to become stable versions from the V0.5 list as to secure versions that we know are good to send to CD/DVD/Paper WP. Lincher 02:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, why was a message about this posted at CVG project, and why should I care? The Kinslayer 15:14, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

A cross-notification was posted at each WikiProject because it would be nice if the WikiProjects worked together to supply revisions of stable versions of articles for my listing. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 15:44, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
My problem with this is having you requesting what can be a pretty significant undertaking from each of the projects before this project of yours has enough backing to even be moved into project space. I think that is premature. —Doug Bell talk 16:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Where the project happens to be hosted is irrelevant. I understand that this is a very large project, and it'll definitely take a while, where the darn page happens to be hosted does not have to do with its maturity as a project. This originally started as my own personal project, but then I decided to get the entire community involved. That being said, as soon as we get a more permanent name[1] we can move this page as, perhaps a subpage of the WP:1.0 project? ★MESSEDROCKER★ 16:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
[1] Apparently, there's already a website called "Stablepedia" so the name should be chanaged ASAP. There's a discussion on the talk page about this.
At the same time, the notification started the discussion about we even want it or not, so it wasn't completely evil. Titoxd(?!?) 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems the eventual solution might be a bot-compliant "stable version" column added to the worklist and assessment tables forming up at the individual projects. Messedrocker's effort is a good exercise on the road to whatever that solution is. -- Paleorthid 17:01, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

The bot tables already have a "version" field, which means that they can be then taggged as "Stable" when a stable version is identified. We should wait until Brion gets that working, though. Titoxd(?!?) 00:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
As I explained above, we should not have to wait for technical implements when we can do it now. Single User Login, for example, was scheduled to be installed a long time ago, and it has yet to be implemented. It may not be as slick, but if we can do it now then we should do it now, instead of waiting for a gazillion years for new software features. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 00:24, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Just create a bot, collect all FA and autothrow anything out below a certain number of citations per text volume. The problem is that even well sourced FA's are far from stable. From time to time we have some knowledgeful editors taking a look at articles and they often find a lot to add or restructure, that's the reason for the FAR. Wandalstouring 03:10, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

People can change which revision to link to on the Stablepedia page as articles improve. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 03:15, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

There is Stablepedia.org[1] which takes pages of wikipedia and calculates a "stable" version of them, using this seems like a waaay better idea plus doesn't waste up and use valuable human time to do this. Mathmo Talk 06:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I am aware of Stablepedia.org's existence, that's why our name needs to be changed. Additionally, I propose a different project. I want this project of mine, Stablepedia-to-be-renamed, to be able quality stable versions, not simply unvandalized stable versions. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 11:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
  • This is a silly idea. All the articles of any value or quality are either a) locked from editing by guests, or b) so big that any change is immedieatly reviewed by several others, and if it is found to be vandalism, is reverted. This is a project that really doesn't need to exist, and I do not believe the aspirations of one person should be represented with a waste of human effort and storage space. Smomo 20:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Many things here my friend, 1) assume good faith, 2) this is not waste of space as we almost have infinite amount of space (Brion says it better than me), 3) we have 17% of errors in 55 articles (that were studied I don't remember where), 4) good editors are outnumbered by vandals as it is (we just have more powerful bots as of now), 5) sneaking information into articles happens everyday and so it is important that we show the public the best material we have to offer (stable versions), 6) it is already going to happen on the de.wikipedia edition so we are just jumping on the bandwagon, 7) tens of thousand of articles are not watched and so they might be plagued by vandalism. Lincher 22:43, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Stable/unvandalised versions will certainly be a great asset to Wikipedia in general, and to this project in particular. My personal preference would be to wait for Brion's software upgrade, but Messedrocker may be right - we have waited in vain for such things in the past. I have doubts about the scalability of this approach, but I'd love to be proved wrong. 57 so far looks like a good start to me, so maybe it can scale! I have the following suggestions:
  1. I think it would be better to revamp the existing WP:STABLE project, rather than trying to create a separate new one with the same goals. If you reactivate the existing page, you will find a lot of people (including myself) have it on their watchlists - some of those will come out and help if someone takes the initiative in getting things going. By all means adjust the goals, etc. of that page to fit your own approach - the project is considered inactive anyway. Whatever happens, though, you are probably going to have to be in the driving seat of the project for at least a year - tagging a lot of articles yourself - in order to convince the community that the project works, and that it is worth giving up other wikiwork for.
  2. If you want a group of articles to start looking at, I think you need look no further than Version 0.5, because most of those articles will form the core of all future offline releases, and because it represents many of the most important and/or best articles on Wikipedia. Remember that offline releases need this more than online - there in no rv possible, you're stuck with 10,000 CDs that all have "David is gay" inserted in the article on tellurium.
  3. If you want to bring the project into the Wikipedia 1.0 "stable" I think it would be very welcome - it certainly fits with our mission. We can at least include it in the navigation template, as a minimum.
  4. I'd urge you to consider how the project could be scalable - even to (say) a 1000-5000/year, and how the project could allow us to hit the ground running when/if the software upgrade comes through. In other words, if you can set up a network of "stable versions" people tagging articles now, those same people can be in the vanguard when the new system arrives.
Does this sound like a plan? Walkerma 05:26, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Hell yes it sounds like a plan! You have thought it out the most here, out of anyone. I'll get to work. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 11:58, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi there

HI, new to this conversation, but was wondering if anyone had a reasonable idea of how big (storage wise) wikipedia is and what kind of media would be suitable to contain it on, peace Basejumper123 21:57, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

that depends on what you want. LossIsNotMore 23:01, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Release version : "outside the scope"

Could there be a page set up for the held nominations or is this a thing we try to avoid for the release version?? If so, I will keep these type of pages on my user page. Lincher 12:26, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

The original idea was that the held nominations page would be a "rolling" page. In other words, now that Version 0.5 is completed and 0.7 is starting:
  • Everything on the V0.5 held page is automatically nominated for Version 0.7.
  • The held noms page then becomes the location for articles held from Version 0.7 nominations. It should probably be renamed as "Release Version/Held nominations" to be consistent with the other pages. Walkerma 17:19, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the come back ... also, it would be nice to go ahead and have the bot pick up on the work we have done for V0.7/Release version. Lincher 20:43, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Now set up. Mathbot should pick up the categories in about 24 hours, then start listing articles a few hours later. Walkerma 06:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
By the way, I notice when people are digging these out of the "held" page for renomination (thanks for that!) they are including the reasons why they were rejected for V0.5. It seems to me this only serves to prejudice the reviewer! I think it would be better just to say, "Was held for V0.5" then let the reviewer decide if it's OK for Version 0.7. Another comment - some articles were initially held from Version 0.5, then added later into Version 0.5 when the rules changed. I think some listed as "Held" may in fact already be listed as passed! Walkerma 06:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
My view on it, is that we could, in fact, hold articles in a way that those don't meet the requirements of WP's guideline for example needs cleanup, not NPOV, seems like original research and so on.
Thanks for the bot glitch.
On another note, I am working on a list in my User:Lincher/Sandbox which will bring articles into WP:WPRV and also show the borderline articles and some other articles that have been assessed but won't meet the requirements (which will be dumped into the held nominations' page). Lincher 06:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I'd just seen some of the articles, noticing a lot beginning with A! Where did the list come from? Shouldn't some of these be nominated first? I know that capital cities like Lusaka and states like Alabama are OK (capitals and US states were agreed upon before), but surely things like Amateur astronomy (which are not obviously a "pass") need a second opinion? Or are these renominations? Walkerma 06:42, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

(no indent) These come from the WP:CONCISE (which has about 9000 articles) list. I'm working on the A's for now. When I know they are of top/high/high-mid importance, I add them, if not I leave them there but I rate them. Finally, the indented ones are the "not-so-sure" if we should include and the * ones will be included.

I think that way, the reviewing will go much faster and we wont have to wait for people that add to the RV Nomination (which is somewhat weak as of now), which is taken care of by Eyu100. Lincher 16:10, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, but we still need to agree that we want all of these articles to be included - and if so, what criteria are to be used in judging this? All of the Vital articles are to be included by consensus, but there hasn't been any discussion on including WP:CONCISE. One concern would be that we may end up with an encyclopedia that has 5000 articles for letters A-M, and only 1000 articles for letters N-Z! Also, that page is not very active as far as I know - for inactive read unbalanced- so how do we know (for example) that it doesn't include 50 baseball players from someone's favourite team, but none from other teams? If we are going to rely on SilverStar's personal picks, then we may as well just pick our own without any reviewing! I really think we need some more oversight. Walkerma 17:53, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I just peeked into WP:CONCISE and jumped to the 'F's. I found Frungy and Futurology. Irk. JoeSmack Talk 17:59, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
I was part of the creation of this list ... this list, as of now is somewhat Western-world oriented which means that there is a need to include more stuff from other areas.
For you other point: 1) I only include about 10% of the list (meaning 900 articles ... that sound really vital).
2) I add articles only if they are part of high importance in major fields (phil/relig/sci/etc...)
3) I indent articles that I'm not sure of their quality/importance which we should discuss and consider to include in the version or not.
4) I Rate almost all articles on that list so that they might be used by the different projects or that they might be later used by the v1.0 project.
5) I try to be as objective as possible and in that regard, will mostly add only really important stuff. Also, I help myself of different outside the project lists to figure out what is important for each field. Lincher 18:03, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

(to answer Joe) I know the list is somewhat plagued by additions people have made though if you prune carefully the less important stuff, there is a decent list of articles that needs to be included, that will probably not have by the WVWP as of now. Lincher 18:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Quick update on Version 0.5

I've been busy on the phone and email recently, but also busy at work so this will be brief (for once!).

  1. Linterweb in France does now have a working (if buggy) test version of their reader software - this should be fine for our release. It should be ready in a month or so. This means we will miss our goal of publishing the CD before Christmas, but it's better to get it working properly - and we will have lots of checking to do anyway. It will sell fpr 10 Euros (1.5 to WMF).
  2. I spoke with User:Anthere and Brad Patrick (lawyer) from the Wikimedia Foundation, there are no road blocks there so we can go ahead. The only involvement of the WMF is to allow use of the Globe logo on the CDs.
  3. BozMo is running scripts on the collection, and helping out. Walkerma 18:00, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Is a torrent of the CD a no-no if it is being sold as well? JoeSmack Talk 18:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It will of course be available for FREE download, including via Torrent, and the reader software should even be included in that. That's the reality for anyone working with us, and they realise that. The only version that won't be available is paper, we're holding off on that until we get more expertise. Walkerma 22:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I have changed the navigation template to reflect what we are working on at the moment, if you feel that anything needs to be changed feel free to do so. I have been bold in updating and I hope I don't make anybody angry. Good day,Lincher 13:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

No, I was going to update that myself this weekend if no one else did - so thank you for saving me the trouble! I'll fix a couple of minor things I noticed. Also, I thought I knew all of the pages, I never knew about (or forgot about?) the Core 1000 page - how does that differ from Vital articles? Which set is better for us to use? I'd be a lot happier with us tagging those pages rather than the WP:CONCISE, since we did have a consensus to include all the Vital articles in Version 0.7. Thanks again, Walkerma 15:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know where it comes from though it was present in the former version of the template for which it was named Suggest for nom (or something like that???), I just gave it its original name. Lincher 16:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
As for the big listings and everything (WP:VA, WP:CONCISE, WP:CORE1000, WP:WVWP, etc.), the way I envision the current V0.7 release is that we will have plenty of time to review all of these. The big picture actually means that we will have more around 10k articles or more. The only fiasco I would oversee is having articles on the CD/DVD that were only assessed by the 1.0 team thus, maybe, giving out a CD/DVD with articles that might not have been well reviewed and possibly plagued with mistakes, with vandalism, with NPOV.
I now have a bit of time on my hand to work on making big lists and working on the core topics with access to facts on file website or biographical sites or others. I will also help to coordinate stuff (as Eyu100 see fits) but mostly help in assessing and adding articles to the release version. Lincher 16:14, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
That's wonderful! I see already that you have done some fantastic work on getting lists and even assessments on cities and provinces, I for one really appreciate the hours of work involved in doing all that. That "Suggest for nom" list (aka Core 1000?) was (I believe) originally a fork from Vital Articles, and we should see if the two lists are still similar. I would suggest that we use that Core 1000 as a crossing out list just like we did at the Version 0.5 Biography review, and add in anything from Vital Articles we see fit. If we could get all of the Core Supplement and Core1000/Vital Articles reviewed, that give us a really solid foundation of important material.
Regarding provinces and cities, I think we should limit ourselves somewhat at first, since we can't realistically check every city and province in Azerbaijan. In my proposal before we started V0.7, which seemed to be accepted by most, I said: "I'd also like to see a states & provinces page covering Australia, Canada, USA, India, South Africa, China and perhaps Germany and some Anglophone countries I've missed (but UK counties, French departments etc are a bit small for this release, IMHO)." I think we should focus on those first, then we can do counties of England/provinces of Zambia/Prefectures of Japan, etc only if we have time. If I can add to my original list, I'd probably include States of Malaysia, Regions of Brazil, Provinces of Indonesia and perhaps States of Nigeria. Malaysia is a strong case, I know from my stamp collecting that stamps from Malaysia actually have different issues for the different states because they are semi-autonomous, and English is widely used in Malaysia. So let's start with these most important, rather than simply trying to work alphabetically then find that V0.7 ends up having provinces of Afghanistan, Åland but nothing from India or South Africa. Once again, THANK YOU for all of your hard work! Walkerma 16:47, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Good, I'll work on that in the coming days. This thus will examplify our work in the field of Geography though with only Core 1000/Vital articles we are missing basic concepts coming from many disciplines. Would you care in directing me toward such compendium of useful articles in fields we probably do not know about (psychology, sociology, law, criminology and so on). Lincher 16:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I think those will need to come from WP:WVWP and MartinbotII, as well as set nominations. I will also try to dig up some ideas - for example on law, this "Top 20"would make a good set nomination (we already have 2 of them, in V0.5). Walkerma 21:15, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:WVWP

The number of articles marked seems to be dropping rapidly. Does anybody know what is going on? I saw on a talk page a while ago that the bot was mass blanking articles. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 22:06, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the discussion was about the hypothetical nightmare scenario where the bot might do that (extremely unlikely!) - Oleg is starting nightly backups just in case, and writing an "antidote" script. The only blanking was of one log, probably because the system limits were exceeded. The actual problem is only with one listing - the WP:Biography list, which is absolutely huge (145,000 articles). The bot is not counting all of the B-Class or Start-Class articles for some reason, and no one can work out why. Till we know why, or Oleg can fix it, the nightly bot runs are not taking place. See this discussion for updates. Walkerma 05:34, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually, on reflection even the nightmare scenario is much less scary than that, it's just blanking of the bot's output. Anyway, Oleg has pinned things down to a problem with the Biography project, and he's just restarted the bot. Hooray! We should see our first update of WP:WPRV listings by tomorrow. Walkerma 05:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Who Profits?

Who would profit from a CD version of the free online wikipedia? Jeepday 14:10, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I suppose anyone who was interested in producing it and then charging people for it. Although the Wikipedia-CD should not really be made for the purpose of profit, but rather for something along the lines of Wikimedia's non-profit mission. ★MESSEDROCKER★ 14:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Mainly people who don't have good internet access (I only got access at home one year ago, and I live in the US!)! Most people active here are obviously people with internet access, who tend to forget that much of the world doesn't have easy access 24 hours a day! The earlier CD has proved to be quite popular, and it was given away free to schools in Africa. Other people may just have dodgy internet access, or be on the road a lot. Easier than trying to find an internet cafe in a strange city, when you only want to know the capital city of Uganda. I think it's important for the world's no. 1 reference website be available in more than one medium.
The new German DVD release is currently ranked #40 by Amazon, and one of their earlier releases reached #1, so clearly there is a market. Our publisher is only planning on producing 2000-10,000 CDs, but that's only for an alpha test; I'd expect Version 1.0 (on DVD) to sell in the millions. Walkerma 15:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Having only just heard about Version 1.0, I too would like to know more about the economics of this venture. I'm not sure that I would want my hard work on improving articles to help swell someone else's profits, & I imagine many Wikipedians would feel the same. In fact, have we consented to making the contents available to "anyone who was interested in producing it and then charging people for it"? Perhaps someone will enlighten me. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 22:25, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

You automatically consent to that in the GFDL. That's what freedom means. Right this very second mirrors of Wikipedia material are earning profits on the ads they place on their copy that they serve to visitors. Luckily, some of them donate some of that back to the Wikimedia foundation. Not a whole lot though. - Taxman Talk 22:47, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
In a couple of weeks you'll be able to download the results of our hard work for free! The entire release is available GPL with GFDL/CC/public domain content. Or if you're lazy you can pay 10 Euros for a CD. Take your pick! Please join us - we are hoping that our work will help Wikipedia reach the majority of the world that does not have broadband in their living room. Walkerma 23:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for all these answers, which have been most informative. It will be interesting to see how long people continue to volunteer to write & maintain WP articles in future. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:42, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

What's the Point of a CD?

For people who don't have internet access? It seems if you have a computer that can play a CD, you probably have access to the internet in some way. Just H 05:46, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I had a computer in Mexico since 1996. I didn't get an Internet connection until 2001. I don't believe that your statement is necessarily true in most countries. Titoxd(?!?) 06:32, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Prisons in the U.S. often have computer facilities, but almost none allow Internet access. I assume that the U.S. is not the only place in the English-speaking world where this is true, but there are about 2 million people in U.S. jails and prisons, larger than the number of people who use any of several languages in which we have Wikipedias. - Jmabel | Talk 06:59, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
For some countries which are out of the submarine cable network (e.g. Bangladesh), internet connectivity is too slow to browse through an online encyclopedia with ease. A low cost CD version of encyclopedia will be a very welcome product there. - Arman Aziz 08:03, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

BozMo's first cut

User:BozMo has come out with a first cut (see User_talk:Walkerma) - I have a couple of comments.

  • Well done!
  • Categories are not there yet - I think they should be. It greatly eases navigation.
  • The 0.5 version is about 515 Meg - a good size for a CD. Pictures are 392Meg of that.
  • BozMo's web link works great - however a downloaded copy does not format correctly - I think I am missing some CSS magic.
  • pictures have been renamed - to 12823.jpg from Nelson_Mandela.jpg - I prefer the original names.
  • I will see if I can come up with a ksearch-client-side javascript search.

Wizzy…☎ 10:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds great! Pascal's first version is at [2], please compare the two and give feedback. In the meantime, I have so far written navigation pages for countries of the world and for some categories - Arts, Language & Literature, Philosophy and Religion and Everyday Life. I hope to finish up the ten categories, and also to expand the country info into subpages that give more detail for each country (such as presidents, cities, etc.). You can also follow things at WP:V0.5TD. Thanks, Walkerma 16:22, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
The first of the more detailed country trees is available at Wikipedia:Version 0.5/AsiaTree, this aims to list all articles in V0.5 that are closely related to each particular country. Feedback is welcome.
Also, the Polish offline reader is now available with English documentation at m:WikiBrowser. Walkerma 17:10, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Persondata

Hello, I was wondering if PersonData would be used in any form in an upcoming release. Thanks and keep up the good work. :-) 70.104.16.182 22:09, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I missed seeing this earlier. I think it would be very good to include this - if the Biography WikiProject is starting to use it on the English Wikipedia, that's good news. We do hope to be able to include some metadata along with articles. Walkerma 02:27, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Assessment

I've noticed on projects such as WikiProject Biography, the 1.0 team has created a dynamically generated class chart (FA, A, GA...) along with listing article assessment changes. Is this hard to set up? Can it be done for other WikiProjects? I'd like to do something like that with the Taxation WikiProject. We just started it this week, so it is not that big yet, but efforts like this, I expect, would help participation. Morphh (talk) 14:47, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, absolutely! There are 239 project currently using the bot, and the bot now crawls through 450,000 articles every 24 hours! First you should take a look at the instructions, as well as the other projects work, then have a go at setting things up. Basically you need to (a) write a template that generates categories, (b) create some categories and the right parent categories, then (c) tag some articles with the template. The simplest thing then is just to wait a day or two for the bot to pick things up, and see what happens. I always check the new projects being added (about one per day is usual), so I'll keep an eye out. If you have any problems, just post your question here and I'll get back to you (though I'll be on the road on Saturday). Cheers, Walkerma 16:35, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
You can get the bot to do it for you as well. See Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Generate categories. Titoxd(?!?) 21:25, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks - I've got it working and looks great. Possible suggestion on the Worklist and the comments section - could this be limited to a certain number of words and then add a "... more" link. I could see this as getting very long and messy. Question about Categories... Many articles have stub tags at the bottom of the main article that goes to Category:Tax stubs, however, the Talk page assessment tag places stubs in Category:Stub-Class taxation articles (which the bot picks up). I tried to put the Tax stubs as a subcat of Stub-Class but it didn't seem to pick it up. I would change the tax stub tag to place it in Stub-Class but this would add both article main and talk pages. What is the best way to address the Cat placement for stub tags and Cat placement for stub assessment in the banner tag? Morphh (talk) 14:25, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
The two are basically unrelated. Every article should be tagged with the appropriate class in the project banner; trying to do something through the stub tags is a bad idea, as they're liable to be removed without another assessment being made, thus purging articles from your assessment system entirely. Kirill Lokshin 14:35, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
When I run the bot manually, it works fine. However, the automated 3:00 AM (UTC) run is not updating the information. Morphh (talk) 16:48, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok.. it just updated. I'm not sure if someone was testing or if it just takes 15 hours to complete the Bot process. How long does the bot take to run? Morphh (talk) 18:51, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
It varies a lot, but it can take 16 hours I think. If you just missed a run, you may have to wait up to 40 hours for it to get picked up, but after that it should happen daily. Walkerma 02:24, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Adding articles fron WVWP

The project now has nearly a third of all articles on Wikipedia. Martinbot (II) could create several more test lists with about ten Wikiprojects (together) and we could check that the importance ratings are OK. If they aren't, we might have to start rating projects based on importance. Eyu100(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team) 15:58, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Let's do it, I'm curious so see how the importance ratings pans out. JoeSmack Talk 16:52, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I plan to get that going in about 10 days time - once the Version 0.5 scripts are finished and the navigation pages done - but I will be writing the algorithms over the next few days. We also have several hundred articles (including sets) to review for Version 0.7, and we have to finish getting Version 0.7 set up (navigation templates, review pages, contacting the reviewers personally, clarify the pass/fail criteria etc) - all that should keep up us extremely busy! I'll be away from home with limited access for the next few days. My personal feeling is that we need to set up MartinbotII properly, so it works well from the start - as you can see with Mathbot it's very hard to change things later on (even changing the size of the stats table was a headache!). Before we set up Mathbot, we spent 2-3 weeks and many kB of discussion planning out exactly what we wanted and how best to do it, and I think that's why it has worked so well. Let's get Titoxd on board too, he can provide a lot of good input. Have a good holiday, guys, Walkerma 18:10, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
OK, I've got something written up here. Please take a look and give feedback. Walkerma 09:04, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Discussion from a trial run I did is now on Wikipedia talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/MartinBotII. Martinp23 16:30, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

other developments

from the latest version of Wikizine...any one know German? [3], [4]. could be helpful for en.wikipedia's version. JoeSmack Talk 05:36, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Using bots for tagging

Hi, recently a user objected to project templates being added by bots on ANI. The bot was immediately blocked as a result of that. Thereafter a discussion ensued which sort of drifted offtopic.

As a result, there was no final resolution to the debate. I am also using a bot for the very same purpose and holding off my bot till there is some resolution. I posted a subsection but that has also started moving in the wrong direction. I request people here to give their inputs on the discussion so that we can bring it to some closure. Thanks — Lost(talk) 13:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:43, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

IRC discussion on upcoming Version 0.5 release

The new developer has started work at Linterweb, and release of the CD is planned for January. I have spent my holiday going through everything listed on the main WP:V0.5 page - it is now completely up to date and in harmony with the Big List. I have added a bunch of navigation pages (click on the headers), a few still have to be done. Meanwhile Kelson has written some scripts for cleanup, the Linterweb offline reader is getting there and things are looking pretty good. I think we need to discuss all the loose ends - how about

Time
20:00 UTC (12:00 PM PST, 3:00 PM American EST), Saturday January 6, 2007.
Channel
#wikipedia-1.0

Anyone interested? Please sign up below, and add any agenda items.

Topics
  • Running MartinBotII on the WVWP articles
Signup

Another Version 0.5 IRC

The IRC meeting on 6th Jan was very fruitful, and we hope to have everything ready for publication of WP:V0.5 by Saturday 13th January. Topics discussed: Searching, spam, CD vs DVD, scaling/size of images, image copyrights/attribution, navigation pages, future subject-specific releases, bad words, metadata - and we seemed to resolve all of the urgent issues, thankfully! To make sure we haven't forgotten anything, we plan to meet on IRC again on Saturday 13th. Please join us if you're interested. Add any agenda items - but please limit this to Version 0.5 since we are hoping to burn the CDs very soon! Please sign up below.

Time
20:00 UTC (21:00h CET, 12:00 PM PST, 3:00 PM American EST), Saturday January 13, 2007.
Channel
#wikipedia-1.0
Topics
  • Anything still needed?
  • Making/burning the CDs
  • Cover art?
  • Distribution/publicity
Signup
  • Sorry to reply so late, I've been AWOL (catching up on sleep, mainly!). If you can join us as soon as you get back that would be great. Unfortunately, 2pm PST = 5pm US-EST = 11pm in France, which is too late for our large European group to start a meeting (in fact some wanted to finish it by 10pm/France). 5pm is also a bad time for me. Walkerma 18:41, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Request for final checks

As far as I can tell, all of the navigation page checking & writing for Wikipedia:Version 0.5 is now complete. I have gone over the main list many times and I think it's properly organised and correct. There is now a complete set of navigation pages, too. I would like to ask people to check the main 0.5 page and the new {{Version 0.5 Navigation Pages}} for any errors. We need a second/third pair of eyes to check for silly mistakes; these pages will be incorporated into the final dump in the next day or two, so it needs to be done soon. Thanks! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Walkerma (talk • contribs) 09:52, 12 January 2007 (UTC).

Only just found this. Am I right in thinking that versions of the articles are going to be burnt to a CD? If I want to see the version that will appear on the CD of a particular article that was selected for the CD, how would I view the version? Carcharoth 15:03, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure, is the straight answer! We had expected that the final dump would be done last week, but the lawyers are delaying things a bit so we may do another dump. We have a script that looks for the most recent non-anonymous version, and we use that. Then we run cleanup scripts to find bad language, and remove "fair use" images/superfluous stuff. I think we will have to set up a version online, as was done with the SOS Children's CD. If there is a specific version of a particular article that is considered a "stable version", we can aim to use that particular version, but at present that would have to be done manually. Until the CD comes out, you can't know which particular version of an article is to be used. Walkerma 16:30, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
Oh. I assumed it would be the version that was reviewed at the time it was selected. Wikipedia being what it is, the articles might have changed a lot since then. How many articles are there again? 1964 is the figure on the front page. Are they all going to be read before the CD is burnt, or is the idea to trust that they are in the Right Version? I've scanned the list, and there are a few in there that are, well, not stable. I have my eye on two articles J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, but while reading another one on the list, alliterative verse, I was shocked to see that it only had a sentence on Tolkien's many uses of alliterative verse. See here for more. Of course, Wikipedia never stands still, so you have to take your snapshot somewhere, but just an example of what I mean. Carcharoth 23:12, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

There is now a project proposal at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#Assessment of unassesed articles for a project which would have, at least as it's short term goal, assessing unassessed articles and possibly adding the banners of the appropriate interested existing WikiProjects. Any editors interested in seeing this go forward are more than welcome to indicate their support there. Badbilltucker 14:29, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Separate Assessment Statistics for Release Selections

I was thinking it might be a bit easier to ensure important articles get nominated for the article improvement drive if it were possible to see at a glance what the current "status" of those articles is. Is there anywhere where this can already be seen, possibly on something like the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/CD selection articles by quality statistics page, which could be used for these purposes? Thank you in advance for your responses. Badbilltucker 14:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I missed seeing this earlier Bill - but in fact we do have complete bot lists, logs and statistics for [[V0.5, the Release Version and for Core topics. The 0.5 log has been invaluable for keeping track of vandalism, name changes, demoted FAs, etc., I checked every entry in the log personally to make sure that the main list gave the current name rather than the name when it was originally added. Walkerma 05:19, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia should come out with an annual readable version of itself

I may be reading Wikipedia in its entirety in the future; by this I mean that I go from page to page (in ABC order) reading or skimming, like you'd read a book. But in order to do this, I have to have to keep going back to the pages that list all the pages on Wikipeida in ABC order, so I can click on the next page I want to see.

So I thought 'it'd be cool if Wikipedia had a forward and backward button at the top of each page, so you could go to the pages before and after the one you're reading (ABC order).' But of course, this would only benefit the rare geek like me who wants to look at all the Wikipedia pages in ABC order.

But maybe Wikipedia could come out w/ a CD that contains all of the pages in wikipedia (at the time the CD was made) in a readable format, with the forward and backward buttons I mentioned. It would allow the reader to view pages in ABC order, or in order of how many people have looked at the page, or in order of how long an article is, etc. etc. You could come out with this CD program at the end of this year; then, each year after that (2008, 2009, so on), you could come out w/ another CD of the same type but that contains only the pages made on Wikipedia that given year.

That'd be cool, and you might make some money off of it. I mean, companies put out new encyclopedias each year, so why not put out a new CD each year like I suggested?Andrewdt85

This button is an interesting idea, though I'm not sure how many people browse a CD in this way! I'll mention it to the developer who is writing the code for the offline reader, and see if it's easy/convenient. The main problem I foresee is that we don't want to clutter up the console with lots of buttons - I'm a great believer that "simple is best" - but maybe it could be added into the article (at the bottom). I think we will have a basic alphabetical list for 0.5, but that would require clicking around. I wrote the navigation pages for 0.5, and they allow you to browse by category or by country (e.g., you can find Freud listed under either psychology or under Austria), but you can't (say) just click to see the next psychology article.
As for releasing CDs, we do plan to make releases more often than once a year - I hope Version 0.7 will come out before the end of 2007 (though it's going very slowly right now). Even 0.7 will probably be too big for a CD, it'll need DVD, as will all future comprehensive releases. We do plan some more specialised releases once we get going - I'd like to see a CD of chemical reagents, for example, also available in print - I think if we can crank these out easily there will be significant demand for them. If you want to help us do all this, please sign up! Thanks, Walkerma 05:12, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Template combination discussion

People interested in how the talk page templates are displayed should take a look at this proposal. Walkerma 07:20, 8 February 2007 (UTC)


Project Statistics

Are WikiProject statistics (those dealing with rating/importance) updated manually or automatically? And how often are they updated?? -- Pastordavid 20:35, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

They update as the 1.0 bot does the main listings, which is to say (roughly) every night. Nifboy 21:09, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. -- Pastordavid 21:13, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

foreign assessments system?

An LGBT Wikiproject just set up over on eswiki, and they'd like to set up an assessments system. I realise now, however, that our wikibanners are entirely dependant on infrastructure put in place by WP:1.0, so wanted to ask if a similar assessment system could be set up over there? Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 18:00, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, you're in luck (I think)! Take a look at this recent discussion and then talk to User:Richy and maybe the Military History project over on es. Please let us know what happens, because I want to note foreign assessment schemes on our 1.0 pages. Good luck, Walkerma 20:22, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Thankyou! I can't speak Spanish, but I have contacted Richy and will alert the esfounder. I'll let you all know how it goes! Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 20:39, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
By the way, Walkerma, in case you did not know, the people at the Hungarian Wikipedia already use the assessment, see hu:Wikipédia:Cikkértékelés műhely/Index. (Richy will have a much easier time adapting the bot code to Spanish though, since I made it less English language dependent since it was ported to Hungarian wikipedia). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:37, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I know something was happening there, I wasn't sure what. Do you know anything about this French work? It was new to Kirill when I mentioned it. I posted a comment here in my best schoolboy French. Walkerma 23:13, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Someone has already replied! Walkerma 23:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Wish we had as active foreign projects in LGBT as MILHIST does... Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 23:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Heh, they are doing the counting by hand. Un, deux, trois... (per google/translate :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:31, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposal: Replace the B-class criteria with WP:MILHIST's

For your perusal (please forgive my ugly table):

Current B-class criteria MILHIST criteria
Has several of the elements described in "start", usually a majority of the material needed for a completed article. Nonetheless, it has significant gaps or missing elements or references, needs substantial editing for English language usage and/or clarity, balance of content, or contains other policy problems such as copyright, Neutral Point Of View (NPOV) or No Original Research (NOR). With NPOV a well written B-class may correspond to the "Wikipedia 0.5" or "usable" standard. Articles that are close to GA status but don't meet the Good article criteria should be B- or Start-class articles. The article meets the following five criteria:
  1. It is suitably referenced, and all major points are appropriately cited.
  2. It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain major omissions or inaccuracies.
  3. It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content.
  4. It is free from major grammatical errors.
  5. It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams.

I feel our current criteria is not at all what's being put into practice, and the criteria should be updated to reflect that. My own experience with WP:CVG's ratings (such as this discussion) suggests that MILHIST has the right idea. The links to MILHIST's specific criteria can be adjusted accordingly, but the criteria are something I feel should be applied globally. Nifboy 23:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the Military History criteria are nicely presented, but they are rather tighter than B was originally intended to be. It was supposed to be, "Getting there, but still needs some serious work." Typically that meant it was missing a major section, missing refs, missing an infobox, or else it was complete but poorly written. The MILHIST criteria specifically exclude many of the things that are specifically mentioned as "allowed" - that is, of course, their prerogative, but I'd hesitate to apply that across the other 300+ projects using the system. I suspect that active, mature projects like MILHIST and CVG may have a large "inventory" of articles that meet their tougher B-Class criteria, but in many areas it can be hard to find many articles that are properly referenced or complete (the latter is true in Chemistry, my field). I disagree with the comment at CVG that "most articles would be B" - I'd guess that in chemistry over 80% are Stub or Start on the present 1.0 criteria, even though chemists tend to reference better than the average. In my 1.0 work I have been to a lot of remote corners of Wikipedia, and B-Class is still the exception, not the rule, IMHO.
I just clicked on 10 random articles, I got 5 stubs and 5 starts, and only three references in total for the entire set of 10 (two of the refs were in one stub).
I rather like the system they use at the mathematics project, see this grading scheme. They use a B+ level (counted by the bot as a B) to indicate things comparable to the tighter B.
This suggestion may also reflect the kind of "grade deflation" (not a bad thing!) which we have seen at FA and GA; we all know that most articles that passed in the early days of those systems would be completely fail to meet modern requirements (incline cites, etc.) because the criteria tightened up. It seems that MILHIST has done the same with B-Class; that's not a problem, it's simply a reflection of the fact that Wikipedia is getting better all the time! In short, I think we could consider gradually tightening the criteria, but IMHO now is not the time, as we have many new projects just starting to look at articles - we don't want them to find all of their articles are only "Start" or "Stub"! What do others think? In the meantime, at CVG you could (a) adopt the MILHIST criteria, (b) adopt the Maths scheme or (c) leave things the same. Walkerma 08:44, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Martin beat me to it. I'd say that MILHIST's B is closer to GA than the B we were aiming for. That said, there's nothing prohibiting projects from establishing stricter, or at least, more subject-based criteria; WP:TROP does that. Titoxd(?!?) 04:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Discussion of quality problems

Your thoughts would be most welcome on the issues I've raised at Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing. Worldtraveller 23:05, 12 February 2007 (UTC)


Importance Temp.

I've created an importance template that seem to be cover all the wikiprojects. In my opinion, there are too many different importance templates, and i think it'll make the scale easier if we could make this the official one. If its not good enough, I'm happy to listen to any suggestions made. --[|.K.Z|][|.Z.K|] 05:16, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a great idea, one of those little jobs I've been meaning to do for a while. One problem with it, though - it needs to be different for every project. If you are the WikiProject on English football, then Manchester United needs to be ranked as "Top". I think, though, if you pick examples that all fall within the same subject area - one that a typical lay person would know (such as pop music, popular TV shows or computers) - it could work. Take a look at some examples from active projects that have used the bot for a while. This template could help projects starting out. I still think, though, we should encourage projects to tailor the scheme for their own subject area - I've really liked what I've seen projects do in that regard. This means in practice they would subst the template in then customise it. Thanks! Walkerma 05:28, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Manchester Utd will be ranked as top class, but the template said Manchester City, which isn't as well-known or popular as United. I agree that this should be used only WikiProjects starting out, but I think that the general style of the template should be used throughout Wikipedia. --[|.K.Z|][|.Z.K|] 07:22, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Hmm. I'm not too keen on this as a replacement for all WikiProject assessment tables of this sort. The Assessment Dept. I'm building for a particular WikiProject uses a slightly different scale (different in that the relative weights aren't so generic; the Top/High/Mid/Low sections all exist, and there aren't any additional ones.) This is even more so when it comes to the Class scale; we feel that what the Biography or Sports wikiprojects consider a Start vs. a Stub, or a B-class vs. a Start, does not reflect what our topical project would actually consider a proper Start or B-class within our articlespace; our requirements will be more stringent. Anyway, our Priority (not Importance; we borrowed Priority from WP:BIO because it sounds less judgemental) scale also uses examples (and more than one) from our own field of topics, since examples like "0.999..." and "Australia" are not very informative at all in our context (and in fact to me look more like the difference between Stub, Start, etc., at least with the examples given.) I think that Importance Scheme would be very valuable as a model or guide, but even to achieve that, the examples all need to be of about equal length and quality, so that "Low" is not confused with "Stub". Shouldn't be hard. There are LOADs of somewhat- down to just-barely-notable, but in-depth articles that have even achieved F.A. status (e.g. the Pokemon minor character that looks like a torotise-thing that was a front page F.A. last year). Great example of Low but F.A., even in a narrow sub-field like children's anime. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:48, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Ed. Team stats boxes for WikiProjects

How does a WikiProject obtain things like these: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Football articles by quality statistics ? How are they created? Who maintains them? How? I'm part way thru setting up an Assessment Dept. for a WikiProject, and have just commented out the sections in which these types of tables appear. I have the Class and Priority (Importance) tables done already. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:48, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

They're automatically generated by the bot that does the actual assessment tracking. Kirill Lokshin 22:52, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Take a look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot to learn how to do this - it's pretty straightforward. If you need any help, just ask here. Walkerma 23:10, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! NB: This question could probably be forestalled from others if either in a <noinclude> or an HTML comment note was made about where to find the docs, in all those auto-generated tables. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:06, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

A-quality rating

It is not at all clear to me what an A rating signifies. There are community-based standards for GA and FA. Recently GA standards have risen and become closer to FA standards; is there even room for a rating between them? What do we use an A rating for? --Ideogram 01:32, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Review#A-Class review for an example. Nifboy 01:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
That doesn't really answer the question. --Ideogram 02:04, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Sure it does—A-Class is the only high-level rating that's actually usable by the WikiProjects themselves, without being tied to some external process. Kirill Lokshin 02:55, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Can an article that failed GA be rated A? --Ideogram 04:22, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
The prerequisites of a rating, if any, are up to the rating project; but, generally speaking, yes. (This is an artifact of the whole shoehorning of GA into the scale business. Frankly speaking, a number of projects have a low opinion of the GA process, and tend to ignore it more often than not.) Kirill Lokshin 04:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I prefer quality ratings to be consistent between projects. I don't like the idea that different projects can use the same rating system to mean different things. Remember what these ratings are supposed to be used for. How do we decide whether to include an article when it has different quality ratings from different wikiprojects?
The GA process has problems, but it does present a Wikipedia-wide standard. To my mind this has more validity than any quality standard defined by participants limited to a single wikiproject. Since there are no Wikipedia-wide standards for quality rating below GA, I am fine with the B, Start, and Stub quality ratings. But the A rating is an anomaly. --Ideogram 04:45, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Some WikiProjects take a more sophisticated approach to assessments than others, mainly based on available material and editor manpower. A one-size-fits-all solution simply won't work; a strict common standard won't be useful for the small and semi-active projects, while a lax one will be unsatisfactory for the larger and more active ones. Remember that this whole assessment system remains, fundamentally, a WikiProject-driven one; if it's changed such that WikiProjects no longer find it useful, it'll simply collapse.
(GA has big problems, in my opinion; I am categorically against making WikiProjects dance to its tune.) Kirill Lokshin 04:54, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
(Consider, also: can failed GAs pass FAC?) Kirill Lokshin 04:36, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Theoretically, yes. In practice, never. If it ever happens we will need to adjust some things. --Ideogram 04:45, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

(outdent) I fail to see how this system serves its intended purpose.

I would be very interested to hear your objections to GA. Where is the best place to hold such a discussion? --Ideogram 05:04, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

What do you think its intended purpose is? (Not being rhetorical here; it has two, depending on the side you look at it from, and neither of those is really affected by this.) Kirill Lokshin 05:07, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
It was my understanding that WP1.0 is engaged in selecting articles for inclusion in a print or offline version. To avoid selecting thousands of articles by hand I expect articles will be selected using some combination of their importance and quality. What do you do when an article has different quality ratings from different wikiprojects? --Ideogram 05:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, we can use the highest one, or the lowest one, or the most recent one, depending on what seems to produce the best results in practice; or we can just examine those (few) articles in that situation by hand. More generally, it's not really different, on some fundamental level, from the (much more common) scenario of having different importance ratings, and the system is being set up such that it can handle that case anyways.
(The other purpose of this system—being a tool for projects to keep track of articles in their scope—is of course quite compatible with differing ratings, since it doesn't involve any cross-project comparisons.) Kirill Lokshin 05:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, rating importance has the same problem. But each of your solutions presents opportunities for wikiprojects to game the system and promote their own articles at the expense of other wikiprojects. And you really don't think that such articles will remain few, do you? --Ideogram 05:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Let's see:
  1. That's what WP:AGF is for. WikiProjects aren't evil conspiracies to overthrow the world order and such.
  2. It's not like there's a limited number of spots that articles compete for; a project could, conceivably, claim its own articles to be better than they are, but this wouldn't affect any other articles in any way.
  3. The people putting the releases together are not completely unaware of what WikiProjects are doing. ;-)
Kirill Lokshin 05:48, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

(outdent)

  1. It's not realistic to expect people and groups to ignore their self-interests.
  2. A print or offline version can only hold so many articles.
  3. Monitoring of wikiprojects will become more difficult as they grow in size and number.

--Ideogram 06:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

  1. Umm, yeah, what does AGF say again? I can't see any exception in there for groups and self-interests.
  2. The numbers are sufficiently large that this should not be a practical concern. (If someone is trying to do an actual print-on-paper version, we haven't heard of it.)
  3. A significant drift in ratings isn't all that difficult to notice, really; and most of the larger projects tend to have people who participate in 1.0 more directly anyways. You are, in any case, implying a project-wide conspiracy that would simultaneously be completely unnoticeable to everyone else; this doesn't strike me as something we really ought to be concerned with on a practical level.
(Incidentally, none of these points actually have anything to do with the possibility of different ratings. Someone being unscrupulous could just as easily bump common ratings up; given the number of articles, there's a decent chance it wouldn't be noticed.) Kirill Lokshin 06:17, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
All right, gaming the system is unlikely. I guess I have to accept the current system (or accept that I'm not going to change the current system). Given that there is no standard quality rating system, I have to ask you, how does the WP:MILHIST quality rating system work? Where is a good place to discuss that? --Ideogram 06:41, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
WP:MHA (and the associated talk page) would seem like the most obvious place. Kirill Lokshin 13:23, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Going back to the original question: I'm not sure there is overall agreement over what an A-class rating means. A discussion I'm having here shows I have pretty different views to others, and I think the phrase "could at least be considered for featured article status" is a bit ambiguous. GA-class is more or less on its own scale, and its differences with A-class are rather unclear (not least because the criteria keep changing). I'm not sure if there's really a need for it. Trebor 16:22, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
My reading of WP:MHA is that A-quality is the only rating that requires a project-wide peer review. Thus it has more validity than the individually rated B-quality and below, and less validity than FA. WP:MILHIST ignores GA. --Ideogram 16:27, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
In small or emerging projects, A is tagged by a single reviewer. Once the assessment system is established many projects have a peer review system. Although MILHIST ignores GA, I think GA has become established now as part of the English Wikipedia, and many of the older concerns over its quality standards have been addressed IMHO. I agree that it would be ideal for the 1.0 project if all projects used the exact same criteria, but in wikiworld that's impossible. However, any differences are fairly small - probably less than the difference between a typical Start and a typical B. Also, I think we can handle this in cases (such as MILHIST or CVG) where we know they have tweaked the criteria (in this case, requiring good refs for B-Class).
Yes, we are setting up a bot to trawl through lists selecting suitable articles, you can see the description here. I agree with both Kirill and Ideogram - we need to assume good faith, but also allow for the possibility of bad faith! In my teaching career I have learnt that if you make it awkward for students to cheat, they will pretty much all be totally honest, and you rarely have to worry. In setting up the bot, I want to build into the system a means of handicapping any project that does try to "game the system" - with the expectation (here is the good faith part) that we will not need it. If this begins to be a problem, we'll be prepared. From what I've seen I think (a) projects are more likely to "game the system" more on importance than quality (easier because importance, unlike quality, is relative to the project), and (b) any such problem is more likely to come from a slanted viewpoint ("but these Latvian football players are some of the most important sports figures of all time!") rather than a malicious plan to take over our DVD with articles on their favourite TV show. So any handicapping that we do is more likely just to correct for different grading practices more than anything else.
Finally, I'd like more feedback on my recent suggestion to use the bot to pick up on GA tags. I'll start a separate section below, though it relates to this topic somewhat. I've noticed that about once a month someone new raises this type of question - and this indicates to me that there is a problem. For every one person who raises the question here, there are probably 10 or 20 people out there in WikiProjectLand who are scratching their heads over this. As I've said before, I think putting (or "shoehorning") in the GA level into the scheme was helpful in the early days, but it's clear from discussions like we've seen at WP:WIF that most active Wikipedians are now comfortable with terms like B and Start-Class. I also think that if we use the bot to tag for GA, we won't get questions like the one here (What do we use an A rating for?), it will be clear from the context without GA levels to confuse the issue. Walkerma 17:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Using WP1.0 Bot to indicate GA status, remove GA from the assessment scale

I recently made this suggestion that we should phase out GA from the assessment scale, and instead use the bot to record whether or not an article is GA or not. The replies were - one strong support, one rather doubtful. We have had recurring questions that indicate that the GA level is an ongoing source of confusion - just a few examples are listed below:

The problem lies in the fact that GA is not typically something that is given by members of the project - it is by an external reviewer. As such it is not a natural part of the Stub/Start/B/A scale of progress - hence the confusion. Any GA-Class article could be equally well be tagged as B or A. FA does not suffer from this problem, even though it is also externally reviewed, because it is automatically higher than any other level. There is not the ambiguity or overlap found with the GA-Class level.

My proposal is as follows:

  1. After discussion/agreement with folks at Good Articles, edit the GA talk page template so that it produces a category "GA articles". Create any other needed categories.
  2. Get WP1.0 Bot to read this just like it reads articles for Version 0.5, and let it produce a (rather useless!) list called Good articles by quality or something like that. It's easiest just to let the bot do its thing!
  3. WP1.0 Bot can then place a note "GA" in the "Versions" column of every "WikiProject Foobar articles by quality" list, just like it notes 0.5, etc. (see example). (It would've been better in the Comments column, but I don't think this is technically feasible).
  4. Once this is established, we can abolish the GA level in the assessment scale, because it will become redundant. A project can see automatically which of their articles is a GA, and since this is tied to the GA template itself it will be more reliable/up-to-date than the current system. In other words, the project still has an external benchmark (this was the reason for adding the GA-Class level into the scheme originally). I don't want to force projects to stop using it immediately, rather we should (a) delete it from the standard assessment template and (b) encourage projects to actually assess the articles as A or B. (I suspect 95% or more will be A) We should leave the GA-Class template in existence, and still allow WP1.0 Bot to read it, but I think it will gradually fade away. In time we should be able to remove it from the statistics tables. This will remove a persistent source of confusion.
  5. Meanwhile, there are great benefits to the GA project as well. They will get an update every night showing how many GAs there are, and for the first time they will have a log showing all of the changes to GAs (I have found at V0.5 this is very useful for catching talk page vandalism!).

Is this a viable solution? Or do most people prefer the way things are now? Walkerma 04:39, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

So, I guess you want the bot to read Category:GA articles in addition to reading each project's GA category, e.g., Category:GA-Class mathematics articles, then putting all that information into the "version" column. That should not be difficult to implement.
The problem is however that as soon as the bot stops treating "GA" as a rating, all those "GA-Class" articles will become "Unassessed-Class" articles and somebody needs to go through them and tag them to "A-Class" or "B-Class". That would be a lot of work and people at all projects need to be educated about it.
In short, the technical problems are solvable, as long as you can take care of everything else. Let's see also if people think that this change is worthwhile (I myself have no opinion). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
You're right, projects would have to assess their GAs, and that's why we couldn't do this change overnight - there would have to be an announcement and a transition period. However, GAs account for only 1844 articles in total (some of those will be tagged as A anyway), and most projects only have a handful, so I don't think it's a big issue. Thanks, Walkerma 17:49, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I've been following some of this discussion for a while, and I think you should not implement this change with only one strong support vote. I strongly oppose the change in the scale as it is now. I understand the problem, but I think there are other solutions.
It is my understanding that the A-class is of particular interest to the projects because they can classify articles that are at a high level from an expert's viewpoint in this category. GA, on the other hand, certifies that the article is at an advanced level from a writer/editor viewpoint. So it would have to be insured that A-class always means high expertise (even if it were rated by a community process like GA and FA, as was suggested recently by Ideogram). As the situation is now, some people think GA interferes with the continual improvement process within a project, because an outsider reviews it. I for my part think it should be (or can be since it's optional) valuable for an expert to see what an outsider thinks and to have some guidance as to whether a person without the expertise can understand the article (no jargon is one of the GA criteria if I remember correctly). If you separate the GA - FA process from the experts creating along their scale (stub to class A), you are likely to end up with a perfect article that is understood mainly be insiders and experts, which then moves on to be reviewed and graded by proofreaders and lay-people. I am not sure if the outcome can be satisfactory to any of the participants. Isn't there an advantage to having the processes intertwined as they are? --Grace E. Dougle 17:04, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I certainly wouldn't make try to force through a major change like this without getting a good deal of support. I agree with you that GAs provide a good "reality check" for projects, that's why I've always been a strong supporter of the GA concept. That's also why I want to see the letters "GA" appearing in project worklists. However, I don't think people nominate an article for GA in order to get an assessment grade for their WikiProject (though some may be looking for an independent review) - so I don't think it will affect GA nominations or "separate the GA process from the experts". There is not a scale going B → GA → A, these are apples and oranges, that is what we need people to understand. That's why ideas such as combining A and GA simply won't fly. You mention some alternative solutions to this problem - can you elaborate? Thanks, Walkerma 17:49, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Will we need a new page to handle logs for GA listing changes if this bot is implemented? Homestarmy 20:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
The bot generates it automatically, and it would look like this example. The bot also automatically generates the worklist and statistics table, and it gets updated every night. So if someone passes the article [[Foobar]] on the talk page, it will be added in by the bot that night and you would see on the log, "Foobar added" or similar. (It might be best to leave the GA template without a quality assessment in it, to avoid conflicts with WikiProject assessments.) Walkerma 22:42, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Um, Martin, don't be so quick to assume that WikiProjects don't send their articles to get an assessment only. For some projects (WP:TROP comes to mind), GA is perhaps the only external assessment that they can obtain, as peer review has been kind of useless to us. (See Wikipedia:Peer review/Hurricane Mitch/archive1 for a typical example.) Also, this pushes the "Is a GA an A-Class article" problem elsewhere, to WikiProjects, but doesn't really solve it. Also, GAs are not generally As; at least in my experience, GAs still need a significant amount of editing for accuracy and technical precision. So, I would oppose an elimination of the GA level from the assessment scale. Titoxd(?!?) 03:16, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a very good idea. --Ideogram 23:33, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Agree that this is a positive change, though I don't agree with Walkerma that 95% or more existing GAs are really 'A-class' articles. IMO, GA reviews and reviewers are so widely variable that they're generally not useful even for getting an external assessment. Opabinia regalis 01:30, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Thirded. The exact specifics of how the existing GAs will be assessed can be worked out on a per-project basis (I suspect that the larger projects will go through them in rather more detail than the smaller ones); but the basic idea of getting GA status out of its bizarre placement in the assessment scale is one I've favored for a long time. Kirill Lokshin 05:44, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
OK, thanks to everyone for their comments. Although I see on balance some support towards a change, it is by no means unanimous, and the number of people commenting is limited compared to the numbers affected. There are (IMHO) enough people opposed to the idea that I think we shouldn't force it through. However, there are many benefits to the GA project if they adopt the bot for keeping track of things. If the folks at GA start using the bot, then I'll see if Oleg can make the change in code to insert "GA" into the tables automatically. If and when that is established, I may raise this idea again - I suspect others will raise it anyway, once they see redundancy in the tables. But until such time there is strong consensus in favor of removing the GA level from the scheme, I'm reluctant to make such a drastic change. Walkerma 06:38, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there something we need to do first to have the 1.0 Bot list GA things? Homestarmy 16:19, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
(Pull left.) I was very interested in this proposal until I saw they the GA category in the ratings would be abolished. The problem I have had recently is that there aren't enough categories to put articles in, especially for the Olympics project. I find that many articles aren't stubs because they're full of tables, etc, but have little to no writing, so they're really not Start-class. Then, with your proposal, there'd be a huge gap between the Start and B classes, and I think there's a big distinction between them. I suggest maybe putting into place another category if you take out GA, because it's very hard to categorize articles into 3-4 categories. └Jared┘┌talk┐  18:07, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Removing GA won't change the gap between Start and B at all. Also, an article consisting of nothing but some tables and no prose is a stub. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 19:39, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant between B and A. It seems that taking out this category would only cause problems with those editors who like to benchmark articles. Taking this out leaves a huge gap between B and A, the two major categories split by the promotion into GA. Once an article is made B-class, it should be watched and carefully reviewed until it reaches the top at FA. Taking GA out of the assessment puts articles at "A" before they are even GA'd, which eliminates a huge portion of this review process. I think this should be reconsidered.
In regards to the table, in the Olympics context, most of our articles are tables because a lot of what we deal with is results, medals, etc. That said, yes, writing should be there, but I certainly have a hard time calling a long, detailed, sourced list a stub. By general definition I see what you're saying, but I think our project must slide the scale a little bit, and this causes problems. └Jared┘┌talk┐  19:49, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a faulty comparison. GA never had anything to do with WikiProject and Release Version assessments to begin with; the B to A gap has actually been there the whole time and isn't actually changing. GA still exists and can be sought independently (which was already the case anyway, since WikiProject and the 1.0 Ed Team don't assign GA status). I.e., nothing's really changing, other than clarifying the lack of relationship between the Start-B-A scale and GA status. The assessment scale also does not include WP:PEER review, either. As for your olympic tables, I don't see what problem is being caused. If the article lacks basic features - even lists should have explanatory introductions, then it is indeed a stub. I think this is a different topic, though. I too have some issues with the current scale (I think B is too easy to achieve, and I think that copyvio doesn't prevent B status is a huge error), but it doesn't related to whether GA should be in the scale when it doesn't actually relate to these assessments. (And it doesn't; it's quote common for something to be assessed as A-Class which has not achieved GA yet, or to be rated a GA when it has no assessment at all, not even Start.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 20:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, fair enough. But couldn't we make this an opt in (opt out?) thing? This seems to be a big change to the wikiproject assessments, which most wikiprojects have. I'm not sure if removing the GA bar would be beneficial. I know for our project, I've been trying to get GAs recently so that we can see where we have to go next as far as bringing up articles. We have an overwhelmingly high number of stubs and starts (which again brings me to the conclusion that we need another category between those two) but little above that. I personally like this category, and I don't think that everyone should have to conform to it, at least not until we get a better consensus. I would be willing to consent to a trial of the proposal to see how it would run, though. └Jared┘┌talk┐  21:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Wasn't my idea to begin with, so I won't defend it much further than I already have. I think the fact that the scale also doesn't include WP Peer Reviews is significant. The lack of it doesn't seem to cause any problems. I can't see any need, personally, for something between start and stub; I could see B becoming more stringent and there being a C occupying the spot B is at now. But really, "Stub" and "Start" aren't particularly different. Both of them mean "this article sucks, work on it", the latter simply implies "this article doesn't suck quite as much as a stub would". B basically means "this article doesn't suck, but isn't very good yet either", and A means "this article is just about ready for FA status". If anything is missing, it seems to be something between B and A. While I can see that some people believed that GA filled that gap, it actually didn't, and removal of GA just highlights that the scale may need a little work.  :-) PS: I don't think anyone is trying "impose" something on all the Wikiprojects, per se. It's just about changing the 1.0/Release Version scale. That has the trickledown effect that all the WPP scales have to change to, since they derive from this one, but that's just how it is, I guess. If the assessment scales were a WikiProject thing that 1.0 had adopted, the relationship would be the other way around. But the whole poing of WPP assessmen scales is to tie into 1.0, so they necessarily have to keep pace with 1.0 or they won't be serving their purpose any longer. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:13, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

(outdent) I like the bot idea in general. However, I am opposed to phasing out the GA status from the assessment scales. The arguments made above against its exclusion already state most of what I would say. I simply believe GA reviews to be a valuable tool in evaluating the actual usefulness of the article to a reader. Vassyana 00:12, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

But GAs already get flagged with nifty talk page templates of their own. GA status IS useful; the point is, in this topic and the like one below, that GA status doesn't actually relate in any meaningful way to WP1.0/RelVer and WikiProject assessments. I.e., no one is stabbing any kittens here. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Then what leaves us from ruling out FA? That's pretty much the same idea as GA. It just wouldn't make sense to take one of them out, and not the other. And we certainly wouldn't want to take out FA. └Jared┘┌talk┐  02:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Honestly, I wouldn't mind that either. There's no real connection between FA and WikiProject/1.0/RV assessments. It's entirely plausible that that an article could achieve FA (which is an independent process) while failing A-Class status, just because different sets of eyes and brains are examining it. I.e., no kittens would be stabbed by removing FA from the 1.0 assessment scale either. Mind you, I'm not advocating that. I think that we generally trust WP:FA to do a good job with assessments, and I think that most of us trust WP:FA to assess better than we trust random WikiProjects to do so. But I don't think that removing FA would do any actual violence to the assessment system. To me, once and article reaches FA, and is protected from boneheaded changes that endanger that status, the 1.0 assessment system is no longer of any particular relevance to that article at all. And FA's get their own nifty talk page banners too; they don't technically need to be flagged as FA by WikiProject banners. It's actually entirely redundant. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:46, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I think I would agree with pretty much SMcCandlish has said. (BTW, the B copyvio problem is something we could discuss later, I think, as copyvios are much less prevalent now than when the system was created) My perception is that although the weight of opinion is probably in support of this proposal, there is a significant minority who are strongly against. I wouldn't advocate riding roughshod over that, when there is no clear consensus to do so. I'm trying to get GAs set up with the bot at the moment, mainly because I think it would help the GA project itself, and if we get GAs autolisted by the bot that will help everyone. Once that becomes established, we can see once again if we can get a clear consensus to eliminate GA from the scale. In the meantime, I think that (as with importance) we can make the whole thing optional - in other words, some projects may choose not to use it, but that is entirely their decision after a vote of their own. Walkerma 06:17, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Assistance needed

Can someone inspect the link below? The page, although done by a bot, is messed up for some reason; http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Album_articles_by_quality/37&oldid=110517893 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by LuciferMorgan (talk • contribs) 22:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC).

Something in Talk:Vicious Delicious/Comments is messing it up, but I can't figure out what... Titoxd(?!?) 22:59, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

That something was the assessment 

{{Album
| class=Stub
| importance=
}}

which really had no reason to be on Talk:Vicious Delicious/Comments , as that's a comment page. I cut it out and now things are back to normal. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Biography articles by quality statistics modification request

I am one of the three editors running the present Biography articles assessment drive. As the present drive is reducing the number of unassessed biography articles, Kingbotk's tagging is increasing the number of unassessed biography articles (as the drive recently discoved). Keeping track of the number of unassessed biography articles for the drive has resulted in a motivational setback because the drive's gains on unassessed biographies have been set back by Kingbotk's tagging. To measure the drive's progress as a way of providing motivation to continue participating in the drive, we would like to keep track of the number of assessed biography articles. Would you please modify the Biography articles by quality statistics template to also present the number of assessed biography articles (e.g., total Biography articles minus number of unassessed articles). Thanks. -- Jreferee 05:42, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I could add such code to the bot, but it will then cause the statistics tables for all other wikiprojects to have that row of assessed articles. I could enable it only for the biography project, but I am very reluctant to make any changes to the code specific for any project (since there are more than 400 projects, and my code needs to be kept simple so that people translating it to other languages won't have trouble understanding it).
In short, I think your request should be satisfied in some other way than directly modifying the table. Perhaps one of you could write a simple bot which will read the statistics table, subtract from the total number the number of unassessed articles, and write that number somewhere else where you guys could see it easily. What do you think? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:08, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Can somebody point me towards the discussion....

Apparently, many empty categories are being deleted. Normally, I would be fine with this but many are placeholders for various WikiProjects. You can see the list at User:Betacommand/Datadump/To be Deleted. As you can see there are many unassessed categories, A class, FA class categoriy, etc in there. Is it a problem for these to remain? Was there a discussion about this deletion that I missed? Thanks in advance.↔NMajdan•talk 20:01, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh my! That was definitely a very bad idea on the part of whoever deleted those. Kirill Lokshin 21:50, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Ok, so it wasn't discussed. We probably should take action so they are not deleted again.↔NMajdan•talk 17:05, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Nevermind, I see you already have. Thank you!↔NMajdan•talk 17:07, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Its happened again.↔NMajdan•talk 14:08, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

New assesment

Hey. I just started up Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics/Assessment. Can you please set up whatever else is needed. Thanks  :) Joe I 00:03, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

It looks like you've got everything you need, now just wait for the bot to automatically add the project to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. It should happen within the next two days. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 00:56, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Great, thanks. Joe I 01:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Changing the assessment scale

Since the addition of GA, the A-grade seems to be a rather un-needed level. Most articles goes straight from GA to FA, without landing on A in between. I suggest firstmost to remove the A-level from the assessment scale. But by doing that, the B-level seems to be rather strange, as then it's the only level that is defined by a letter only, so I also suggest to rename that level into something else. Suggested renaming could be "Ok", "Mid", "Standard" or "Well"

The resulting scale would then be: Stub → Start → Okay → Good → Featured. →AzaToth 01:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

This has been discussed many, many times now; the upshot is that (a) there's a strong consensus against removing A-Class, as the projects can't actually use GA-Class as an assessment level, and (b) there's a practical effort being undertaken to remove GA-Class from the scale entirely now. Kirill Lokshin 02:02, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
On that last point (b), I should clarify that we didn't get unanimous support for removing GA from the scale, but I think we plan to discourage use of the GA level where possible. We also plan to flag GAs automatically in the tables, so you can see that this A-Class article in the list is a GA, but this other one is not. On that note, I have been working on a template, so as to get the GA project using the bot. Note that the template does NOT have the class parameter (is this unique?), but it does include the category parameter like {{V0.5}}, since GA uses these same categories. The main thing it should do is to place things into the oxymoronic Category:GA-Class good articles (to keep WP1.0 Bot happy), as well as the main GA category; at present these cats have a colon in front, until I take the template out of my sandbox. Could someone knowledgable at templates (Kirill, Titoxd?) take a look over my crude cut & paste job for the GA project here? Thanks, Walkerma 03:18, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
NB: That's a redundancy, not an oxymoron; "GA-class stubs" or "Stub-class Good Articles" would be oxymora. :-) Anyway, I don't see any problem at all with removing GA from the assessment scale, since the two are not really related, other than it will take a lot of cleanup work - every article GA-rated by a WikiProject banner will need to instead be not-actually-downgraded to B-Class (or genuinely-upgraded to A-Class, if one is willing to do a close assessment and the article warrants the A rating), and then tagged with a GA header if not already so-tagged (either directly or in that new article history template that is making the rounds). An alternative that I don't think anyone has proposed before would be to fork GA into a "general" Wikipedia-wide GA assessment process at WP:GA and a new aspect that also empowers WikiProjects to do equivalent GA assessments, possibly obviating the need for A-Class to exist any longer, and with WP:GA able to countermand any WikiProject-assigned GA rating if the GA criteria were not actually met. I'm not proposing that, I'm just saying it is a possibility worth looking at and either discussing in depth for possible implementation, or consensus-rejecting (for) now "on the record", since it would almost certainly come up later anyway. I don't think this is WP:BEANS, as the "authority" of WikiProjects is growing all the time, and they are focusing more and more on assessments and ratings (cf. the rather new branch of the V1.0 Ed Team specifically about how WikiProjects tie in and assess importance/priority level, not to mention the near-Policy level of SfD, to which even CfD defers when it comes to stub categories, which was generated by WikiProject Stub sorting); if it's not discussed now it will still have to be at some point. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 04:36, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
PS: Category:GA-Class good articles is a redlink. Did it get moved, or did you mean something else? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 20:53, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for correcting my English - correctly right! Yes, the proposed cat is a red link, because I won't create it until the template goes "live" (ie., after people have checked it). Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Walkerma 21:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, I used the bot to create Category:GA-Class Good articles et al. The template looks ok, for the most part, although I'll tweak a thing or two. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:34, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I just found a typo, and that was pretty much it. It should work ok now. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:38, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiReaders for the English Wikipedia?

After discussing Wikipedia:WikiReaders on a WP 1.0 IRC recently, Titoxd recently posted a nice blog on Wikireaders that appeared on Planet Wikimedia. In this he throws down the gauntlet - can we make Wikireaders on en, as the de:Wikipedia:WikiReader Germans have done? I think this is definitely possible. We may need to locate a suitable publisher, but other than that I don't see any major hurdles. We have enough people and infrastructure here at the 1.0 project to handle this. I would suggest the following:

  1. Set up a WikiReaders subproject here at 1.0
  2. Solicit suggestions from WikiProjects (WP:WVWP may be able to help with this).
  3. Work with the relevant wikiproject(s) to put together at least one collection as a "demo".
  4. Show the demo around some publishers till we find a suitable publisher of paper. (Maybe approach the German publishers too.) I would suggest focusing our efforts on small publishers, they are much more open to this (they stand to gain a lot of publicity).

I think it would be great to be producing CDs, DVDs and real books from this project - that was what the 1.0 project was originally conceived to be about. Walkerma 22:32, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I think #1 is as close to a "must" as there could possibly be. Again, the second point I brought up at Planet Wikimedia is that many users don't know they can make WikiReaders, but most importantly, they don't know how. One question, though: how large should a potential reader be? I mean, do we want things to be 10 pages, or do we want them to be in the order of magnitude of 100? 500? 1,000?
I ask because my dream as a member is to see a bunch of dead bark on a shelf, open it, and say, "I wrote that sentence." I imagine most people want to do the same too. It is much more feasible to print something as a WikiReader than to print the entire encyclopedia, for both legal (who wants to take the risk?) and practical (who wants to print 1.7 million articles?) reasons. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 23:48, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I have been meaning to get publish LGBT articles in Wikireaders for a while now, but got distracted by plans for an LGBT textbook on Wikibooks. However, if you want to use WP:LGBT as a starting ground (maybe by publishing all the Homosexuality and religion articles? They're a fairly well defined, broad series), I am happy to throw myself into it and haul the project along behind me if you would like. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 12:29, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Version 0.5 going on sale next week!

Assuming there are no last minute hitches, the Wikipedia:Version 0.5 CD should be going on sale on March 26 at www.wikipediaondvd.com for around 10 Euros/$US13-14 (a portion goes to the Foundation). It will also be made available for free download. It consists of 1964 articles and a set of navigation pages, with an open source (GPL) search engine, Kiwix, developed by Linterweb. We now have an ongoing collaboration with Wikimedia France, and User:Kelson wrote many of the scripts for Version 0.5. This CD will make a great birthday present for your loved one! Walkerma 05:54, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! :-) Kirill Lokshin 11:23, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
It looks now like March 30, but that's looking pretty certain. Walkerma 09:18, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Great 164.116.80.114 18:19, 26 March 2007 (UTC) (I am eyu100)
Out of curiosity, how is this going to be advertised to the Wikipedia (and larger Wikimedia) community? This is an issue that has been raised on Wikibooks in the past, and unfortunately has not really been resolved. And it has been something that I have tried to tread very lightly around on proposals to build a for-profit publication, even if a major (even if nearly all) portion of the profits go to the WMF. IMHO letters in the various mailing lists is tantamount to commercial spam, and links on prominent pages of this project is also nearly identical to a form of commercial advertising as well.
I think if this were done directly by a local chapter, some of the advertising issues could be mitigated, or if some sort of "official" or even semi-endorsed arrangement with the WMF were to happen it might be possible. I guess I'm trying to say that this could be one very hot firestorm of trouble if you are not careful here with what you are doing, particularly since this website, "wikipediaondvd.com" is clearly using WMF trademarks, including the Wikipedia logo. The WMF did a DMCA take down notice when we tried this on Wikibooks. Don't say I didn't warn you, but this is going to be something absoutely huge on controversy if you aren't very, very careful here. And I'm not the one to convince either. --Robert Horning 00:52, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your concern. Don't worry, it's all official, the WMF is very much aware of the release. We have been keeping WMF informed throughout most of the process. A legal agreement was signed between Linterweb and the Foundation to allow use of the logo. The Foundation will also be issuing a press release about Version 0.5, even though this release has been totally produced by the wikicommunity and Linterweb. Note also that the collection will be made available for free download, and entire release is open source. Cheers, Walkerma 01:13, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Stubs

How do we rate stub articles which have absolutely no scope of expansion? For example Guz is an obvious stub, without much chance of expansion, but for the topic it covers it can be rated as a class B too. (relatively speaking) =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:28, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

In general, stubs with no potential for expansion are good merge candidates, which solves the problem rather neatly. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 17:20, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Template help

Hey, would someone mind looking over {{WikiProject Indiana}} for me. Right now it doesn't include the dab, list, template, portal, image or cat classes. I have used those with the template on pages, but then it asks for an importance rating, which all but the list don't need. I tried updating it the way I know how(I'm very non-template knowledgeable) but I think the comment section was screwing me up. Anyways, would appreciate the help, thanks. Joe I 04:22, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Assessment help

I am trying to set up assessment for my project but am having trouble undrstanding what i am doing. Are there any instructions on how to do this? Simply south 19:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot is a good place to start. Do you have your WikiProject template set up to accept ratings? I can create the categories for you using the bot, if you'd like. MahangaTalk to me 20:07, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
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