Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 26

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:WikiProject Council. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 20

←

Archive 24

Archive 25

Archive 26

Determining the future of B-class checklists

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Clear consensus for option 2, i.e. B-class checklists will be removed from all projects which have not opted out of project-independent quality assessments. Any project wishing to use the B-class checklist in future will need to opt-out of WP:PIQA. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:11, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

82 WikiProjects have opted-in to use the B1-B6 checklists as part of their assessments. For these banners, code like |b1=yes|b2=no (etc.) determines the class rating. Since these checklists are project-specific, they can lead to conflicting ratings between projects, which is an obstacle for the switch to project-independent quality assessments that reached near-unanimous consensus earlier this year.

So we have two options:

Option 1 is to adopt the B-class checklists globally for all projects and move them to the WikiProject banner shell. See here for how it would look.
Option 2 is to drop the use of B-checklists by these 82 projects. Note that WP:MILHIST will be exempted from this, since it opted-out of project-independent quality assessments.

I will notify all 82 WikiProjects so they can participate in this discussion. DFlhb (talk) 11:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Pinging @Ixtal, InfiniteNexus, Favre1fan93, Monstrelet, and Kusma: who participated in the last related discussion — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ - Today for first time in along while, I did copy/paste of Class-B checklist (at Talk:Association football positions). How about Option 3? For articles with the checklist already there, Display it instead of "Show". For Class-B articles without the checklist, add it or display the copy/paste with instructions of how to add. BTW I do find that checklist very helpful. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 17:27, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Survey

Option 2, after some thought. The point of B-checklists is to indicate what still needs work to reach B-class (for example, referencing, or grammar), but that duplicates the role of cleanup templates, which can be far more precise, targeting specific sections, paragraphs, or sentences, and which are more actionable since they're added to various popular backlogs and draw the attention of cleanup-focused editors. To my knowledge, B-checklists are not used as backlogs for referencing/grammar/etc cleanup; their categorization makes this impossible. I also found that B-checklists are rarely used by these 82 projects; roughly 90% of their eligible articles (meaning B, C, or Start-class) lack a B-checklist. While article cleanup tags are useful, B-checklists are redundant, siloed, and unusable as backlogs. To fill out missing B-checklists, keep them up to date, or keep them in sync with article cleanup tags, would be busywork without tangible impact. Frankly they seem like a relic of an earlier time. DFlhb (talk) 11:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 I'm not convinced the benefits outweigh complexity of maintaining them, and agree with the reasoning given by DFlhb. -Kj cheetham (talk) 11:45, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Leaning Option 2. DFlhb makes a good case, and it aligns with my long-term feeling (as an active wikiprojectorizer on various topics) that the B-class checklist template flags are tedious, disused, and sometimes just outright faked. (More than once I have seen someone put a B-class rating on an article, find that it still showed up as C, then re-edit to include all the checklist flags as "yes"; when I looked in the article to see whether all the checklist items were in fact true they were not, and I had to bust it back down to C-class, with accurate checklist parameters set. And it was basically a waste of time for everyone.) A system people either mostly ignore, or occasionally abuse on purpose just to evade it, is not serving a useful purpose for us. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:49, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. Keep it simple. I am a simple editor who is involved in article assessments only occasionally. But when I did assessments, I found these B-checklists very confusing, especially because the banner would not update if I change the class (and while working in the wikitext editor, I did not even know what "B1" or "B2" refers to). In this case, less is more. I do not think the benefit of these checklists outweighs the added complexity and resulting confusion of less experienced editors. --Jens Lallensack (talk) 12:32, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. I've never found B-class checklists very helpful or useful. To keep things simple, I support dropping the checklists from all 82 projects that use them. Volcanoguy 12:45, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 1. I know that I at least use the B-class checklist, and have encouraged others to as well. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 12:53, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2, but not forever. I don't think the current B-class assessment system is useful, but I still think there should be a B-class assessment system. My vote is to scrap the current set-up and work towards creating a more intuitive and widely-adopted one, which is designed for the unified WikiProject assessment. Fritzmann (message me) 13:35, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. I concur with Fritzmann that long term there needs to be a better process, for determining B-class articles, standardized across all WikiProjects. I find all assessment to have quite a bit of wiggle room based on user beliefs, but if we are working to standardize this for all projects, B-Class will need a better defined assessment model moving forward. Demt1298 (talk) 14:03, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 Rather cumbersome to fix all the backlogs of list parameters and maintain it. I think there should be a better way of doing B-class. Noah, AA^Talk 16:27, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 1 Removing the checklist means that article classes will mean that article classification will not be related to article quality. The proposal is saying in bold capital letters that Wikipedia does not care about quality of articles or sourcing.Nigel Ish (talk) 17:30, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Not what the proposal says. DFlhb (talk) 18:42, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 It's difficult to keep those checklists in sync with the quality of the article. TarkusAB^talk/contrib 17:47, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 per the previous discussion. InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:02, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 1 The checklist provides a means to evaluate and give basic feedback to an article. That it can be outdated is a shared problem with the entire assessment system. While it is not always used, I see no benefit to cutting out the option if a user wishes to use it. CMD (talk) 18:02, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 1 (as "not broken- don't fix" has been ruled out). The B-class checklists help projects identify specific issues. THey also allow editors to judge particular aspects of quality even if they are unsure about others (I might not be able to judge if an article covers a subject accurately but I can definitely note that references are missing) They exist alongside specific cleanup templates not instead of them. Quality rating is in the eye of the beholder so editors from different projects rating the same article differently is to be expected whether they use B-lists or not.GraemeLeggett (talk) 18:28, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
- Different projects rating the same article differently is what WP:PIQA is moving away from though. -Kj cheetham (talk) 21:45, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
  Indeed. Regardless of the outcome here, any project can retain B-checklists by opting-out of PIQA, as MILHIST did. If a project decides that they expect to rate articles differently from other projects, that by definition also means opting-out of PIQA, and they're perfectly welcome to do so. Option 1 is of course an option here, but it's not the only option for projects that decide they want to keep B-checklists. This proposal isn't about limiting any projects; it's about deciding how global assessment (PIQA) should work. DFlhb (talk) 22:40, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 1 if. I lean towards O1 but we need to make it esier to use them and edit them. When clicked, there should be some kind of popup. Editing them in code, and remembering if a given project uses 5 of 6, and what they are called, and whether they accept a yes or y parameter or whatever is a major pain. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 00:54, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2, hesitantly. I feel like these lists are very cumbersome and so I am hesitant to edit them, but I feel as if they should be replaced with something - but I am not sure what. For most editors, including myself, they do not adequately serve their intended function. PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:02, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2, with some regret (could support option 1 if some improvements are made). In theory, the B-Class checklists are a mini-review that gives an article author some feedback on why their article has received a certain classification. In practice, the B-Class checklists are under-utilised and often years out of date. One other problem is that I can never remember what B1 through B6 even are; if Rater or other tools had nicer and well labelled checkboxes it could help a lot. If the checklists are removed, I suggest that this is preceded or accompanied by a bot run that posts to the talk page what the assessment used to be ("On 6 March 2013 this article was rated C-Class. It passed the B-Class criteria for citations, but failed on accessibility for a general audience"). —Kusma (talk) 09:36, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2, Keep it simple, I agree with most of the points brought up by people who voted option 2. Wandering Morpheme 18:33, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 per my comments in the previous discussion, where I've felt the checklist perhaps no longer as served its purpose. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 02:39, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 1 weakly per WP:BROKE. This whole thing has been very unnecessary, and I really believe that it would be much better to just keep as-is. The article assessments are useful, and deprecating the checklists seems like a problem to the WikiProjects that have opted in. 🐔 Chicdat ^{Bawk to me!} 11:06, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
At WikiProject Germany, I pushed for the use of these checklists more than a decade ago, and I regret it. The Germany project has a far too large scope and insufficient manpower to run an independent B class assessment scheme. I would like for us to opt out again, project independent assessment is the way to go. —Kusma (talk) 19:56, 1 November 2023 (UTC)

It would be helpful to know how many articles actually have filled B-class checklists. For the Germany project, it seems rather uncommon, and most existing ones are MILHIST or haven't been updated in ten years. —Kusma (talk) 20:02, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
I note that @DFlhb already answered my question (I should learn to read!) If there are checklists on under 10% of the articles where checklists would be applicable, then given the age of many of the existing checklists we probably have under 5%, more likely under 3% of eligible articles with roughly up to date (less than five years old) checklists, and those would better be converted to talk page messages or cleanup tags. —Kusma (talk) 12:08, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
In fact looking at the above I agree with Fritzmann's reasoning above. 🐔 Chicdat ^{Bawk to me!} 21:33, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 The checklist is only meaningful if the article is below B-class. If an editor notices problems it would be a more valuable use of their time to place an inline tag, place an inline comment, place a cleanup banner, start a talk page discussion, and so on. B-class is not reader facing, it's entirely about article improvement, and the template checklists have little impact on article improvement. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:31, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 For a editor-facing to-do list on article talk pages, we already have the more flexible Template:To do and Template:Tasks. QuietCicada - Talk 00:33, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2 - I do a lot of assessments and have not found these helpful; I use cleanup templates. But, it's not all about me. Is there an option to create a separate checklist template that can be added separately to the talk page of articles where desired? ~Kvng (talk) 16:56, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. If an editor wants to rate an article B... let them. Don't make them fetch a shrubbery as well with the b1=y, b2=y, bloat. If an editor truly isn't familiar with the B-class guidelines, they should look them up before rating the article, but we already encourage that with a link to Wikipedia:Content assessment. Once an editor knows the B-class guidelines, there's no need to make them recite them over and over again. Besides, the B-class assessment doesn't even "matter". Assessments are routinely ten+ years out of date with no ill effect. The only assessments that really matter are GA, A, and FA, aka the ones that involve some sort of peer review. B-class is meant to be lightweight and quick, so let it be that way. If there is more detailed feedback to give on article improvement, use cleanup templates or a normal talk page discussion section instead. Besides, if an editor is bound and determined to mis-rate an article, the individual B-class criteria are unlikely to stop them. If there's some desire to replace or resurrect something similar, it should be only with assessments that can be fully automated by a bot, e.g. how most of the MILHIST B-class assessments are performed. SnowFire (talk) 18:32, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
If there's some desire to replace or resurrect something similar, it should be only with assessments that can be fully automated by a bot, e.g. how most of the MILHIST B-class assessments are performed Fully agree - DFlhb (talk) 18:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. The checklists are a pain, and I suspect 99% of editors assessing just tick all the boxes without reading the rubric. If a project wants to opt out and do a more-thorough review for B class, nothing is preventing that. If someone thinks the article is almost B class but, say, needs a fuller lead, then just rewrite the lead, or at least comment on the talkpage that that is what is needed. Espresso Addict (talk) 03:05, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2, not used anymore. Not suitable for Wikipedia's scale. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 13:10, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2: Aside from GAN reviews, I personally don't see the difference between B-class and Good articles. Issues such as missing citations or weak writing can be dealt with during the review process. ResPM (T🔈🎵C) 14:26, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2. I think that in the rare case that a project wants to have a project-specific evaluation, it should be a separate track from the usual evaluations. A-class does that (it is only project-specific), so that's ok. Special variations on B-class does not, so B-class evaluation should be standardized rather than forcing reviewers to vary their evaluation depending on project or to pay attention to project-specific rules for projects that may not even be the most salient ones for an article or its reviewer. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:35, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
Note: consensus is becoming fairly clear, so I may close this discussion in a couple of days in favour of option 2 — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:03, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
Option 2: It seems to me as if many, if not most wikiprojects chose B1 to B6 years ago and that the editors now involved are no longer set on this complex approach.--Ipigott (talk) 07:39, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

I've been far too busy with real life to participate in discussions at the appropriate times, though I have been able to follow some discussions. What I see is a hijacking of less active projects, specifically their ability to manage their own content. If it keeps going at this rate, most projects will have no reason to exist except for a venue for editors to push their favored sources. Obviously, there's "near-unanimous consensus" for such a thing. More to the point, there already is a B-class checklist at Wikipedia:Content assessment, where you click on "show" next to "More detailed criteria". Are many editors aware of this? I previously expressed concerns about unearned B and C assessments based largely on the number of subject headers and/or the number of images in an article. I don't recall anyone seriously tackling that concern during any of the discussions I did read. Is this going to be addressed whenever PIQA is fully rolled out? Style over substance has become a glaring problem across the encyclopedia over the past five or so years. Rewarding editors for such only makes it worse. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 03:40, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
As I wrote in the previous discussion, the whole system is broken. If you ask me, I would throw away A-class, B-class, and C-class entirely — all subjective ratings arbitrarily assigned by random editors without an "official" process, subject to change if one editor feels like it, or neglect if no one bothers to re-assess an article's quality. InfiniteNexus (talk) 04:42, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Post-close comment

After closing the above I thought I would leave a comment, that there is a possible compromise for projects that wish to continue using the checklist without leaving PIQA. They could use the checklist without it having any effect on the quality class - so just an advisory checklist to help editors, but when all the criteria is satisfied they would then have to manually change |class=B — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:59, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

What's the status of the checklist being removed? Has it? - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:01, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

It's gone. There was no interest in my post-close suggestion so all checklists (except milhist) were removed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:16, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

I was only curious, because I didn't see any edits to {{WikiProject Film}} (one of the ones that had the checklist) and the code still includes |b1=, |b2=, etc. Should that ultimately be removed from those project templates, and subsequently from the articles still using the B-class checklists? - Favre1fan93 (talk) 18:44, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Those parameters will be identified as deprecated and removed at some point. I don't think there is any hurry to remove from articles, but could perhaps be done one day. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:03, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps this task can be bundled with the implementation of project-independent assessments by bots, if that's still happening. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

WikiProject Louisville converted to participation (action center) model

Per recent consensus and after waiting to see if there were any objections, I converted WikiProject Louisville away from "membership thinking" as much as I reasonably could without eliminating the sign-up sheet, which still holds some usefulness. Note that I was already moving the project in an "action center" direction, so this conversion wasn't that difficult. Lemme know what you think. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 04:28, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

help

I was recommended to come here from a wikiEdu. student advisor about reviewing my page and possibly getting some tags removed.

When I moved my page from my student sandbox, I got confused between my class tab that was open and the wikipedia move page I made a mistake and tried to fix it making a bigger mistake. My page has been flagged but I have continued to work on it, to improve it and correct errors. Can someone here check it out to see if the citation work is worthy of removing the tag? and could you please leave me information on my talk page. thank you

the page is Swaddled infant votive WikiTikiTavi63 (talk) 00:48, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

WikiTikiTavi63, this is probably not the page you were recommended to visit. That said, you correctly opened a discussion on the article talkpage, where ideally the tag issues are resolved. CMD (talk) 01:46, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

ok. Thank you.

I am trying to figure things out. WikiTikiTavi63 (talk) 01:48, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

No problem, just letting you know. I have commented on the talkpage. CMD (talk) 02:44, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Set index articles

Happy new year everyone! Please see Wikipedia talk:Content assessment#Request for comment. I am trying to get consensus on what an SIA is and whether they are a useful classification of article on Wikipedia. Please comment there. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:53, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Editors most active in a WikiProject's articles

There used to be a regularly produced report which showed the most active editors working on a specific WikiProject's articles. I forgot where that was, but I sure could use something like that to figure out who to invite to participate or who to give an occasional barnstar to. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about, and if there's any tool available today to help with this? Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 08:55, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Those lists made it easier to identify potential new members, too, especially for someone trying to WP:REVIVE a group. It's at pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Video games, but the bot has been broken for a long time. MusikAnimal (WMF), is getting this bot fixed a realistic project for the Community Wishlist? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Reviving is what I'm trying to do, although the main project I maintain uses a participation model now. I've taken other efforts to try to raise the project's profile, but having this list updated again would be of special assistance. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 19:07, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if it could be replaced by a Quarry query, for one-off/on-demand information. I'll go ask at Wikipedia:Request a query. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:11, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your assistance over at Quarry. This looks to be of great assistance. Having a bot make a list automatically would be great, but running this query is a good stopgap. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:01, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@StefenTower, I don't know how far along with the process you are, but I've got my (remaining) list at User:WhatamIdoing/WPMED invitations, and the ones I've invited so far seem happy to be contacted. I expect (and kind of hope) that future lists will be shorter. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Also, my interest is in relatively new editors (to get them connected and on the right track), but you might want to focus on more experienced editors (e.g., 100 or even 1,000 edits), as high-volume editors are more likely to be active participants in watching the WikiProject's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Even though I raised the editcount to 50,000, I got a list of just 13 entries (6 of them IPs) in my first try. I've looked at just one of them so far. They already had my project's banner on their user page but wasn't in the project's optional participant list. I gave them a barnstar for their longtime dedication to a particular article included in the project and noted they could add their username to the participant list if they wished to. I'll explore more of them probably this week. Running this query should be of great use over time. Thank you for following up! Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 19:38, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

For your purposes, you probably shouldn't have an upper limit on contributions. I think a lower limit of 100 or 1,000 edits might be reasonable, though. OTOH, if you're finding such a small group already, then a lower limit of 10 total edits is probably fine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:49, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I suppose I can go without an editcount limit, but I was thinking that if an editor has been around past 50,000 edits, they would already be well aware of wikiprojects, but I of course could be wrong. :) I can play around with the query and see what happens. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 19:56, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

They'll probably be aware of WikiProjects, but they might not be aware that you'd like them to put your favorite WikiProject on their watchlists. That's the "news" for your message. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:41, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough. :) Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 00:42, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I ran the query again with no upper limit on edits, and it gave me one additional entry... me. LOL. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 04:24, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

It's a pretty small subject area. Perhaps looking edits over a longer time period would help you get more than seven names? You could run it for a year instead of a month. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh I thought the data that was available doesn't go back more than 30 days. Isn't that what we were told over at Quarry? Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 04:34, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I lowered "% in project" to 5, and now I have 12 named editors other than me, so perhaps that's more workable. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 04:41, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I suggested 30 days, because that seemed like a reasonable first step for me, but I think that page history data can be queried for as far back as the page existed. It's less useful to invite someone who hasn't edited for months, but you should still be able to get the names. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:57, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Women Do News

A new Wikiproject appears to have been created at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women Do News. I'm not exactly sure how to do all the categorization/talk page formatting, but I think that help would be appreciated. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:47, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Why don't they join forces with WikiProject Women? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:06, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

That would be a good question to ask the Wikiproject's creator. It might be worth suggesting that on her user talk page. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 03:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

It sounds like this is an edit-a-thon group, like Wikipedia:Art+Feminism or Wikipedia:Black Lunch Table. They're "a group of editors who want to work together", so they're welcome to call themselves a WikiProject if they want to, but they might find the Wikipedia:Meetup approach to be a better fit (or to have additional value; it's not an either/or thing).

Given how useful articles about media and journalists are to editors, I particularly appreciate their subject-area focus, and I wish them lots of luck. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Still not a single post on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women Do News. They seem to be operating off-wiki. Mollystarkdean would you like to comment? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:36, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Africa

Should Wikipedia:WikiAfrica be merged with Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:26, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

It appears to be an external project working with Wikimedia, rather than something Wikiprojecty. CMD (talk) 00:57, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject Fire Safety + Fire Protection

Hello, this is kind of a big question, but I would really appreciate it if someone could respond. I would like to combine the defunct Fire Service and Fire Protection WikiProjects into one encompassing WikiProject Firefighting. How would I go about doing this, since neither has much (if any) active members at the moment. Can I go ahead and be WP:BOLD with it?

After creating the WikiProject I will go about trying to recruit possibly interested editors (as I have done before at WikiProject Somaliland) but I am mainly curious on how I would logistically go about the first part of this. Again, any feedback is much appreciated, cheers! Johnson524 23:20, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

It sounds sensible. I would make the proposal on each project's talk page to see if there is any response. Ifre is no opposition, then go ahead. You'll need a decent number of editors to make a success of it. Let us know if you need help with any part!the — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:23, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ: Thanks for the feedback! I'll let you know in a week if there was any response. Cheers! Johnson524 23:25, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

@Johnson524, thank you for taking this on. I suggest waiting a month. We have rarely encountered an semi-active editor who turns up right after the merge happens, and is mad because he didn't get "enough" notice. A week can be argued to be insufficient, but pretty much all the other editors will agree that a month is plenty.

You may find the checklist at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces useful, even though you're talking about a simple merge-and-redirect. WP:REVIVE has advice for how to get the group going. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:03, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Hello @WhatamIdoing, and I'm sorry for completely forgetting to respond 😅 Thanks for the helpful information, and I'll take your advice in waiting for a month. Cheers! Johnson524 23:33, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

@Johnson524: I made a few tweaks to clean up the merger you performed. I see each of the defunct-now-merged projects had one or more members listed on its respective project page, at least some of which have been recently active and at least one of those in fire/emergency-response topic-areas. Would it be worthwhile inviting all (or "all active within the last XX months") of them to the new project? DMacks (talk) 07:39, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

@DMacks: I think that sounds like a great idea 🙂 Thank you for your help on the merger, there was a lot more work to do than I originally thought, and I fell asleep before I could get it all done. Going to keep working on it today though, cheers! Johnson524 16:08, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussions at Template talk:User in region § Template-protected edit request on 19 October 2023 and Template talk:User WP § Members vs. participants

You are invited to join the discussions at Template talk:User in region § Template-protected edit request on 19 October 2023 and Template talk:User WP § Members vs. participants. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 15:52, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject Electronic literature

In connection with this project, I am trying to introduce stats for article quality assessment. I have created Category:WikiProject Electronic literature articles by quality but there seems to be a problem. Can anyone help? Would also appreciate help with populating the empty categories Category:Unknown-importance Electronic literature articles and Category:NA-importance Electronic literature articles. (cc:MSGJ, Bearcat)--Ipigott (talk) 11:45, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I think we've solved the problem with the categories but it would be good to have the project listed under Literature on the Directory.--Ipigott (talk) 14:05, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

A wikiproject move/merge proposal

FYI

– Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wine#Requested move 18 October 2023. These don't come up all that often and are probably of "infrastructural" interest to regulars here. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:30, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, thanks for this note. I'm sorry I didn't see it until now. There's a (non-RM) process for merging WikiProjects that respects the fact that WikiProjects are groups of people, rather than groups of pages, and that sometimes a division is due to human reasons (e.g., personality conflict).

I do agree with the sentiment that many WikiProjects need to be merged up to bigger groups. One could imagine, e.g., this wine group as well as Wikipedia:WikiProject Beer becoming part of the more generic Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Beverages Task Force. The problem is that this process takes a couple of hours per full merge, and nobody wants to do that systematically. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Well, there should never be a wikiproject split (or failure of one to merge that needs to merge) on the basis of two editors having a personality conflict. That would be a WP:PROJECTFORK. If two editors have an issue with each other, they need dispute resolution, or for one or both of them to simply withdraw from the topic area if the dispute remains intractable after DR attempts. A merge of two projects into one might take a few hours, but is not all that big a deal. It's not like merging hundreds of articles or something. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:48, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

A WikiProject is not a process of any sort, so it won't ever fall under the heading of ==Process forks==.

Are you volunteering to merge up WikiProjects? I think I could literally keep you busy for a thousand hours with that, if you're willing. The first one or two are the hardest, but after you've done it a few times, it does get faster. You've already got the template editor user right, which will help with the banners. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:25, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

I would be down to help, if I had a list of the most wanted/relevant WikiProjects for merger. I'd rather merge two active/semi-active projects than bother with defunct projects. I'd also love to read documentation somewhere of what needs merging. Asides from archives of past discussions, categories for the different importance/quality categories...anything else? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 00:50, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

The usual thing is to merge a defunct or barely active WikiProject into an active one. Some examples include:

Seeing if Wikipedia:WikiProject Alien wants to merge up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Film
Seeing if Wikipedia:WikiProject Turtles wants to merge up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles or Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces for a checklist. These pages don't necessarily need to be converted to task forces (=separate sub-pages), but it should give you an idea of what needs to be covered. Off hand, there's moving or redirecting all the pages+sub-pages, the talk-page banner itself (e.g., Template:WikiProject Capitalism), the cats produced by the banner, any userboxes or special barnstars the group made, and any cats produced by the userboxes. But the first step is to find a group that seems to be too small and another group they could merge into, and asking them if they are willing to have the groups merged. Like trying to merge groups of kids in school, if they don't want to play together, we can't really make them, but most are willing.

On the size of the groups: I don't think I'd recommend small steps. For example, if everyone is willing, it's probably better to jump straight from "Turtles" up to "Animals", because the "Animals" group isn't very big either. But if they think that amphibians and reptiles will get ignored too much in the bigger group, then merging up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles would give both the turtles group and the amphibians group a better chance at survival than leaving them separate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:46, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think merging inactive projects is particularly useful though. When two dead wikiprojects are merged (with each other/or upstream) they don't increase community engagement. On other hand, to semi-active or even active WikiProjects will immediately see improved flows, if they're merged, with centralised talk discussions instead of fragmented discussions.

Some WikiProjects like WP:TRUMP or WP:OBAMA are best left dormant, until they become active again instead of attempting to shoehorn them into WP:USPOLITICS.

On other hand, something like WP:ISRAEL and WP:PALESTINE would be ripe for merger, but needs to be discussed with the communities first, on a common name etc.. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:46, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

This might not be the year for that particular one. Wikipedia:WikiProject Computing and Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science might be viable candidates for merging. I'm not sure how they describe the differences in scope. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:42, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

How are two different countries a valid candidate in your opinion? Would you say that WP:GERMANY and WP:AUSTRIA should also merge? Gonnym (talk) 22:10, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Merging small countries (as defined by the number of Wikipedia editors, not the actual population) up to regional areas or to whole continents might help all of them. A WP:WikiProject German-speaking countries might be more successful and sustainable than separate groups for Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. When we have very few contributors, the groups fall apart. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:40, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

We used to have a very nice and active Wikipedia:German-speaking Wikipedians' notice board (the talk page was where most of the action was). The Germany WikiProject has very nice article alerts, but is otherwise not very active these days. Given how massive its scope already is, merging it with other projects does not sound appealing to me, though. —Kusma (talk) 22:49, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Quite a few countries are covered as taskforces already. Many separate projects set up for a specific country are moribund. (Even the regional ones are moribund, but small steps.) Any discussion would be ad-hoc based on activity (or other en.wiki considerations), rather than being connected to any actual metric relating to the actual country. CMD (talk) 02:19, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I think creating a WikiProject without making a proposal should be a CSD criterion! There are so many created which will never get off the ground. A recent one to be reactivated was Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra but that should really be part of Mathematics — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:31, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree here. While I also agree that merging inactive projects into their parent is better than leaving them, I really don't see any value in even that. Most of the inactive ones can really just be deleted which would save countless editorial hours in the many fixes that these pages receive (be it in templates, categories or lint fixes). Gonnym (talk) 22:13, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

A lot of functionality such as article alerts and large-scale quality surveys are built off WikiProject infrastructure. Deleting them means these are lost, whereas making them a task force maintains these potential functions to my understanding. CMD (talk) 00:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's generally the case.

@MSGJ, if you wanted to create rules around creating WikiProjects, I think that a more relevant standard would be requiring a certain number of editors (e.g., six editors, not counting brand-new accounts) to self-identify as participants. A WikiProject is a group of editors, and a set of pages without a group is not a WikiProject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:42, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. I would say 10 ideally, but 6 would be a good minimum. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:16, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

We have Wikipedia:WikiProject Glasgow created with one participant, but that one participant (Sahaib) has been spamming talk pages with {{WikiProject Glasgow}}. I don't think this is particularly helpful — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:17, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

It's worse than I thought. On the same day Sahaib also created Wikipedia:WikiProject Lanarkshire (again with only one participant). @Sahaib: please stop, this is disruptive — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, these aren't helpful. Not everything needs a WikiProject (and in most cases, most really don't). Most don't even need a separate task force. While the idea of a task force is good, in practice, if there aren't enough participants it just doesn't do a good job. Use (in this case) Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland and its talk page for anything that's needed for these pages.

On a side note, I believe its time we also take a look at Category:Defunct WikiProjects (including Category:Defunct task forces, and later on Category:Inactive WikiProjects, including Category:Inactive task forces) and delete associated categories and templates. We (as a collective) waste too much time on fixing issues with pages related to these (including having thousand of pointless categories and banners). Gonnym (talk) 12:25, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I think everything benefits from a WikiProject – but a WP:WikiProject is "a group of editors", not "one person". If there's only one person, there is no WikiProject.

@Gonnym, the only reason that 99% of those pages are in that category is because nobody has volunteered to do the work to merge them up to non-defunct projects. Are you willing to work on that? These pages about Lanarkshire, for example, would get a proposal to join Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland, and you could put almost the entire list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Scotland#Specifically Scotland-related in the same merge proposal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

No, I do not want to do work that I think is pointless. Every one of the projects listed there should be deleted. Gonnym (talk) 22:13, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

We don't normally delete a former group's pages because someone might try to WP:REVIVE a group, and because it helps understand historical actions. It'd be like deleting an article's talk page, rather than archiving it, just because it's old and not being used right now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:24, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

MFD of WikiProject Glasgow and Lanarkshire

Discussion for the proposed deletion of two newly-created projects (Wikipedia:WikiProject Glasgow and Wikipedia:WikiProject Lanarkshire) has opened at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Glasgow. Thanks. Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 20:16, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

MFD of WikiProject The Weeknd

An MfD discussion which proposes the deletion of Wikipedia:WikiProject The Weeknd is ongoing at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject The Weeknd. All the best, ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 16:06, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Template Is_contentious is now available

Template {{Is contentious}} detects if a given article is tagged as contentious, and is now available for use:

{{Is contentious|Transphobia}} → yes
{{Is contentious|Giraffe}} →

This should be useful to WikiProjects which have lists or tables of pages they might wish to tag, or to arrange in certain ways depending on article attributes. Further developments in this area are in progress. Please report any issues with this template below, or at the Template Talk page. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:48, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

MFD discussion for WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound

An MFD discussion which proposes the deletion of Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound is ongoing at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound. All the best. ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 05:09, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Updating the proposal process

Back in the day, Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals was a more lively place, and if you wanted to start a group, then there were people watching it who might be interested in joining. Just 13 still-active editors are watching the page. Basically all the proposals fail, to the point that we stopped marking them as failed years ago. The typical proposer is a single individual, often less experienced than we might wish, with neither a group of editors nor any plan for finding and forming a group.

We have more conversations here about how to merge inactive and semi-active groups than how to start new groups or how to WP:REVIVE existing groups. The most useful groups are large (100+ participants) and have a broad subject area ("plants", not "tulips"). We probably need something on the order of 20 very large groups, or 200 large and medium-sized groups. What we have is 2,000 mostly tiny and mostly inactive groups. Creating new groups can be a good idea (e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 four years ago) but it is almost always a waste of the creator's time.

Given all that, I'd like to know everyone's thoughts about the future of creating new groups. I'm looking for a gut feeling, not for anything carefully considered. For example, you could tell me where you fall in a spectrum that runs something like this:

Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the Special:AbuseFilter.
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.

Feel free to write your own ideas.

(I do sometimes wonder whether we could get WMF grant money to pay an editor to systematically merge some of these WikiProjects up to larger groups. The technical work involved in merging the group's templates is not my idea of fun.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:51, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I don’t think systematically merging WikiProjects is a good idea. If the WikiProject is dormant, it won’t become active by mixing with other dormant things and diluting the old focus of them all. I think WikiProject have mostly served their purpose, which was to coordinate editors during exponential growth periods.

New topics can be served by a new WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19 being an excellent example.

Prohibit creation of new groups and enforce that through the Special:AbuseFilter?
I am averse to that language, “prohibit” and “endorse”. Can we instead take away (archive by blanking) the instructions on how to make a WikiProject?
Require prior approval for pages created by any non-admin (e.g., a proposal signed by six people who intend to participate).
Like. Why six? I’d suggest seven. Seven is less likely to divide into ties.
Discourage creation of new groups, e.g., by warning editors not to create the pages (but not actually prohibiting them from creating the pages).
Yes. As above, do this by removing the instructions on how to do it
Allow people to create the pages freely, but speedy-delete or redirect them if they don't meet certain simple activity goals within the first month/year (e.g., six active editors signed up as participants).
NNOOoooo. Newcomer enthusiasts do best when they creatively create, and then when you BITE them with speedy deletion of their good faith efforts, … that’s not how one grows a project.
Re-write the proposal instructions to require proposals and to require a reasonable number of initial participants.
Yeah, let’s do that now. A new WikiProject needs a proposal and seven editors signing on, intending to participate.
Do nothing, because it's really not that important.
It’s not like WikiProject creating is burning resources (storage, volunteer time) in large amounts, but we do know that the current list of proposals are very unlikely to achieve anything but the disappointment of the person trying. However, we’ve known this for a very long time, and would be a good thing to do something.

I don’t think systematically merging inactive WikiProjects is a good idea. But I do think systematically tagging and archiving them might be.

I think one of the factors that killed WikiProjects is the autotagging of new pages with WikiProject banners. For me, this is analogous of finding a former champion too tired to get out of bed, and force feeding them their old champion’s diet. If a WikiProject doesn’t have enough active volunteers to tag new pages of interest to the WikiProject, then it is time for the WikiProject to wind back its scope, not to have New Page Reviewers force feed new pages into it. This auto WikiProject banner addition removes the most basic job of WikiProject maintenance from its last casual maintainers, but chokes these last maintainers with too many new pages. Not only that, it also misinforms the new article writer that there are others who might care about their new article, when the WikiProject is defunct but some wheels are turning due to outsiders. I think defunct WikiProjects should be auto tagged defunct, and defunct WikiProjects should be unable to be tagged onto now pages, and maybe old tags should be removed. I think AfC and NPR volunteers should STOP applying WikiProject tags. I think there should be a rule: You may only apply a WikiProject tag if you are an active member of that WikiProject.

- SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:29, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

When you say "autotagging", I assume you mean a non-automated but systematic process. I think groups marked inactive don't get added very often.

In terms of merging, consider the list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Science#Mathematics. Why not merge/redirect all the inactive groups up to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics? That would reduce the risk that someone would attempt to contact a non-existent group for help with an article, or that NPP/AFC folks would add tags for them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Mathematics is a rare active WikiProject. That merge would be good. I mean don’t merge things into an inactive WikiProject. Also, ask the WikiProject whether they want the stuff merged in, don’t just do it. Don’t do it unless they say yes. In fact, expect them to merge it in themselves. Are they active and interested, or not? SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

We've got a process for merging WikiProjects, with a standard recommendation to wait at least a month for any objections. A completely defunct WikiProject won't object because nobody who cares about the group is still editing, so we don't necessarily want to require active agreement. To give an example, merging Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra into Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics would require:

one editor thinking it's a good idea (good enough to inspire that editor to make the proposal),
non-resistance from Wikipedia:WikiProject Polyhedra for at least 30 days after making the suggestion,
acceptance by Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics, including a decision about whether it's a straight merge or the creation of a task force, and
someone(s) doing the practical/technical work (merging templates, redirecting pages).

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:45, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Personally I'd fall closer to the high end of the spectrum, something closer to "prohibit or heavily limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support". Certainly one of the biggest problems with wikiprojects has been the constant creation of small limited-participation wikiprojects for topics of very narrow interest — the ones that are still relatively successful, like mathematics and film and music, are for broad subjects that encompass a lot of topics, while many of the underperforming ones are excessively narrow silos, like single-topic WikiProject One-Specific-Musician or WikiProject One-Specific-Actor playpens. But, alternatively, WikiProjects also have the ability to create task forces, which are still under the management of the overall wikiproject but allow editors to hone in on more specific topics of interest within it — but those, conversely, don't seem to be anywhere near as well-known, even though they would often suit the needs of new wikiproject creators better than a full-on wikiproject would.
For instance, there aren't nearly enough active editors on the subject of Canadian film to justify or effectively maintain a full-on WikiProject Canadian Film — I'm not the only active editor on the subject, but it sure feels like I am sometimes — but as a task force within WikiProject Film, there's not nearly as much overhead required: it doesn't need its own dedicated templates and can be tagged for with a Canadian=y flag inside the existing parent project's templates; it doesn't need its own dedicated importance or quality rating infrastructure and can just use the parent project's assessment criteria. So as a WikiProject it would be unsustainable, but as a task force within a larger parent WikiProject it doesn't require as much sustenance in the first place — and as a task force, it also benefits from the ability to bring in outside eyes when needed, because sometimes all that's really needed is the eyes of people who edit on film in general. (Editors don't require any special expertise in Canadian film to know that the IP who keeps vandalizing Nicole Dorsey's article with stuff about chocolate milk isn't adding anything of value, for example: you don't need a master's degree in Canadian film history to recognize that as inappropriate, and it can be watched out for by absolutely any responsible editor in the world so long as they know that Nicole Dorsey's article exists. So it's kind of the best of both worlds: the task force exists to be on top of identifying Nicole Dorsey as a film director who would qualify for an article, while the broader wikiproject as a whole can keep an eye out for the milk vandal.)
So I'd be closer to the "stop or severely limit the creation of new wikiprojects without broad support" end of the spectrum — but what we can also do is better document the role and value of wikiproject task forces within larger parent wikiprojects as an alternative, and then allow the parent wikiprojects to monitor the creation and maintenance and mercy-killing of their task forces on their own. Task forces still shouldn't be created without being proposed first, but the parent wikiprojects should be the venue for their proposal and discussion — after all, WikiProject Music is in the best position to decide whether it needs a The Weeknd task force or not. Bearcat (talk) 14:53, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
My experience with WPMED's task forces is that most were pointless, a few were active for a couple of years, and then they all fizzled out. I'm not sorry that we created them, and I do think that it's a valuable and frequently preferable alternative creating a completely separate group.

(Canadian film sounds like a subject that might interest The Interior.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps we need to close down the proposals page, as they are not getting the attention they need. Probably better just to direct editors to this talk page? For example Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Southern African Music and Sound was created in February, but no one commented. Today that project was created at Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound. Hard to fault the creator because they did follow the proposal process. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe suggested archiving/blanking the instructions. I think closing down the proposals page could be part of that. We could replace it with a note saying that a WikiProject is a group, and unless you already have a sizable group, any pages you create need to be in your userspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Yep, support that — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:55, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

In my opinion, there is hardly a reason to create new WikiProjects and they require unique cases (such as Covid). Anything worthwhile for a project was already created - countries, sports, media, etc. Any new project created is usually DoA and I don't see any bright future for Wikipedia:WikiProject Southern African Music & Sound. Additionally, these create a ton of maintenance issues that these creators either don't know or don't care about in templates, categories, lint errors and other places. Even merging dead WikiProjects is pointless. Everything other than the main page and its talk page should be deleted and marked as historical and the rest deleted. In the TV project we have many dead task forces that don't do anything other than collecting dust (Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Fawlty Towers task force a task force for a 12 episode series, or Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Awake task force for a similar amount). Even task forces should be about a broad subject that actually needs collaboration that a simple talk page can't handle. Gonnym (talk) 07:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I have less of a problem with new task forces being created within existing projects. But we could perhaps streamline the process of marking them as inactive so they don't clutter the banner — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The fact that they are still in the banner is something I have an issue with. Look how long the code and /doc of Template:WikiProject Television is when most of its task forces are dead. At some point we need to recognize that we should be serving our active editors and not some false historic sentiment. Gonnym (talk) 13:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it should be suggested that after finding a sizeable group of interested editors, they should consider finding the best matching parent WikiProject that still has some activity, and try holding their discussions there. If there's enough overlap in interests amongst the groups, then both of them can benefit. isaacl (talk) 07:17, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes that is also good advice, although the parent project may not be clear cut in all cases — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:49, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Interdisciplinary subjects are a problem for finding a "parent", but I think that's manageable. People can always ask for help here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:24, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The interested parties can choose any one they prefer, and as deemed necessary, provide pointers on other project discussion pages to discussions on the page where they are collaborating. isaacl (talk) 16:29, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Per the above discussion, I shut down the proposal process by editing Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals. The next two tasks are:

Reject/archive most of the old proposals listed on that page. The ones from February and March should probably be allowed to run their course, but the rest are likely old enough to be stale.
Update the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide to completely change the process. Step #1 might be blanking most of what's there.

I can't spend much time on wiki today, so I'd love it if someone else could do some of this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Decade overviews

I have set up Category:decade overviews as a set of categories, as well as articles, and navboxes, as part of WikiProject History Contemporary History task force, which I chair.

Please feel free to contact me any time, with any comments, ideas or questions. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 14:39, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Looks useful. How is it supposed to work exactly - for example is 1870s in film supposed to be in Category:1870s decade overviews? Is there any effort to populate all these categories? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:59, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

hi @MSGJ. that is an excellent question. actually, it is meant to be used for articles that are themselves an overview for an entire decade. so therefore if a category pertains to a decade, but the articles within it are only for specific years, then no, that category would not be included there. thanks.

please feel free to comment further or at length, if you want. thanks!! Sm8900 (talk) 15:03, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

ok. i see that 1870s in film is indeed an article covering an entire decade. so based upon that, yes, it could go in the decade overviews category. I'm open to any feedback of course on this. thanks! Sm8900 (talk) 15:04, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ, thanks to you, I have now set up Category:Century overviews as well. thanks for your helpful input! Sm8900 (talk) 15:11, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I think you have a redundant word in Category:20th-century century overviews :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:19, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ; yes, ok. that's a quesiton of nomenclature which we should probably resolve now. down the road in the 22nd century, they may thank us!! :)

ok, so you favor Category:20th-century overviews, as the name format for this set of categories? Sm8900 (talk) 15:21, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

So do I. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:51, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Done ok, done. thanks!! Sm8900 (talk) 20:35, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Manual § Other

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Manual § Other. Specifically, please see entry on the list entitled Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 March 13#Category:Harold B. Lee Library-related film articles. Thanks! House Blaster (talk · he/him) 18:57, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject The Weeknd

This project was recreated, again without going through any proposal process, despite the recent MfD. A G4 speedy was declined, but just like most of these musician WikiProjects, I doubt this has the legs to be maintained. Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 16:54, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

@Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars, we're currently discouraging people from using Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals, as it's basically broken.

@Another Believer, two months ago, we had a consensus to delete that page. What do you think has changed? Has an actual group formed? (WikiProjects usually need half a dozen or more experienced editors if the group's going to survive for more than a few months.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:10, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject

I have created Draft:WikiProject food and drink industry in England. The main article bein Food and drink industry in England, but there are many other articles that can be added to the wiki project.

I am looking for members to work on the articles, create new articles as necessary, expand and maintain current article and hopefully get these articles onto the Good article list.

I have requested help on the Teahouse as well as making the request on the WikiProject. ChefBear01 (talk) 16:25, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

@ChefBear01, a WP:WikiProject is a group of contributors. If you don't already have a group, then you've probably wasted your time in creating pages for the (non-existent) group to coordinate their work on. I suggest that you join Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink instead of trying to create a splinter group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:57, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Proposed merge of inactive history WikiProjects

I've proposed merging a number of inactive WikiProjects into WikiProject History. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History#Merge inactive history WikiProjects. – Joe (talk) 10:04, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

I support this idea. we would welcome them. i also support some development of task forces to replace these wikiprojects. this would of course depend upon the specific interest level of the community.

as one idea, can we use this as perhaps a good opportunity to discuss some general ideas on how task forces might be structured and developed, specifially to make it more likely they would be actively used, and would be actually useful? open to all ideas. thanks! Sm8900 (talk) 18:13, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Most task forces are not actively used in the long run, so IMO it makes most sense to plan for that eventuality. Task force (as a place where a small subgroup talks something over) are most useful temporarily ("A few of us are going to take this to a subpage, to avoid cluttering up the main discussion page for the next year or so") or for ongoing specialized processes (e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/A-Class review).

@Sm8900, if you are interested in supporting this, you might check the history pages for the inactive WikiProjects, to see if you can find any still-active editors and invite them to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History. I have done a bit of this with newer editors for WPMED this year, and I find that it's helpful to give a specific call to action. People want to be given a specific, positive action they can take, like "sign up for our newsletter" or "help with our Backlog of the Month™". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:05, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Defunct

Read: Wikipedia:Help desk#c-TSventon-20240519100100-48JCL-20240518212700 told me to come here. 48JCL (talk • contribs) 12:02, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

@48JCL, I suggest that you merge those projects. Based on your description, the process should look like:

Leave friendly notes at both talk pages, asking whether they'd like to merge. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Living People Patrol#Merging up to a bigger group is an example of one such message.
Wait a month. You want to give people plenty of time to respond.
If nobody objects, then WP:MERGE or WP:MOVE pages together.
It's helpful if you can update Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory and other pages. I suggest checking Special:WhatLinksHere to find any places that should link to the new page.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

New process

Hi. I was just wondering when the new proposals process will be ready, because after looking at the archived discussion, I found no specific time mentioned. Thanks. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 12:41, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

CanonNi, thanks for your note, and for searching the archives. I don't think we have a timeline.

We haven't fully figured out what the new process should be. I think the main goal is to discourage creations that are likely to end up defunct within a year. That probably means that the group needs to have half a dozen experienced editors (you would count as experienced). It probably also means discouraging people from creating new WikiProjects.

I wonder what sort of rules be most useful to you. Would it be more helpful to have a rule that says "Do not create a WikiProject about a single person, business, sports team, or similar organization"? Or one that is more generic and says something like "The scope of a WikiProject should be more than 1,000 articles." WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:09, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Sharing some of my recent WikiProject skunkworks results

Using the Database report tool and my growing understanding of the database, I've been able to create useful pages/tools for use in a WikiProject:

Tracking old issues in articles (over 10 years old) - this is a good supplement to what the CleanupWorklistBot produces
Knowing which articles are possibly undercategorized
Viewing articles edited the most over the past 30 days
Project-wide and focused change patrol

I've also used PetScan and Quarry to generate other useful lists to aid in project work. (Note: not everything in the table was created by me)

Any of the above can be copied over to almost any WikiProject with minor tweaks. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 01:44, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Since this post, I added two more features based on the Database report template:

Viewing project-included articles newest to Wikipedia to see if they need cleanup, tagging or improved categorization
Viewing the most volatile articles, size-wise, over the past 30 days

Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 22:32, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Systematically merging WikiProjects

Picking up on something from the discussion above, I get the sense that most of us who think that WikiProjects are a good but underused model would like to see them quite aggressively merged into broader topics – based on the observation that big groups like WP:MILHIST or WP:WOMRED seem to be the most effective. (I get that those who don't think they're a good idea, or that they have run their course, don't see the point of this, but we don't lose anything by trying.)

There is a process for merging inactive WikiProjects but it is cumbersome and therefore underused:

It assumes that inactive projects should become task forces of the merge target, which greatly increases the technical complexity of the merge – but why would we want an inactive project to become an inactive task force?
It only really works for fully-inactive projects, but merging ten inactive projects is likely to just result in one inactive project. Ideally we want to be merging one or two active projects with a larger number of semi- or inactive projects.
It has to be done case by case with individual discussions, making it very easy for a small number of objections ("We're very happy here in WikiProject Colourless Green Ideas, thank you very much") to wreck the whole process.

I think to have a chance of reviving the WikiProject model on a larger scale we need to be more aggressive. What I envisage is getting broad, community-level consensus that we should aim to have projects at a certain level of agglomeration – I'd suggest aligning it with the ORES topic taxonomy, which is derived from the WikiProject Council's directory and now used across a wide spectrum of tools and processes, but a potential RfC could present several options. Of course, if there are genuinely active projects under that level that don't want to be merged, then they could remain. But with the rest (the vast majority) we could proceed with merging on a WP:BRD basis, and without creating task forces. – Joe (talk) 09:59, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

section break 1

Some good ideas, and definitely worth discussing more broadly with the community. WikiProjects are currently under utilised, and any ideas for revival should be actively explored — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:06, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

I agree, and I think that trying to pull the history-related projects together is a good first step.

Joe, I think that technical complexity, especially wrt the banner templates, is a problem we need to solve. We don't want to end up with duplicate banners, and there's an advantage to keeping old pages visible (e.g., if they contain lists of editors or ideas), but the goal of merging groups of people is to end up with one group of people. Consequently, I think archiving old talk pages and redirecting them to the main talk page should be encouraged. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:29, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I agree. I think that and merging the banner templates/categories is the main benefit of merging, as opposed to just marking the inactive ones as inactive. – Joe (talk) 08:17, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

There are a few reasons taskforces are useful, off the top of my head they can be separately noted on templates and maintain their own lists of articles. These can be useful tools for tracking, especially if the parent Wikiproject is huge. (Presumably task forces are also easier to re-convert into Wikiprojects if needed, although I'm unsure if this has ever happened.) For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Brunei is totally dead, but it would feel suboptimal if a merging into the ORES/Articletopic Wikipedia:WikiProject Southeast Asia (Also dead but putting that aside for now) led to the loss of its tracking categories. CMD (talk) 06:48, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I totally agree that task forces are useful, but if a topic has proved not to have enough interest behind it to sustain a WikiProject, why would we assume it can sustain a task force? I think it's better (and easier!) to do a clean merge, then let the merged WikiProject decide which, if any, topics it wants to spin out again as task forces. It could also be done on a case-by-case basis so, yes, when merging countries it probably makes sense to retain a task force as that's a natural subdivision. – Joe (talk) 08:20, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I do not assume an inactive Wikiproject can sustain a task force, my point is that the technical tools developed as part of Wikiprojects are helpful even without an active editorbase. For example, I do not think there is enough interest to sustain Wikipedia:WikiProject Brunei, but there is a practical use to being able to follow Wikipedia:WikiProject Brunei/Article alerts. It is at least a fun curiosity to be able to see Wikipedia:WikiProject Brunei/Recognized content/Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Brunei articles by quality statistics, and the sum of having these for each country provides some rough pointers to think about systematic bias. To my understanding, these tools are linked to the existence of task forces, due to how the bots work. Some projects might not have useful tools of course, my mind went to inactive country projects as I've long wondered if/how they could be merged. CMD (talk) 09:34, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I see your point, but if there is not an active editor base tagging articles as within the scope of the WikiProject, then these bot-generated reports will also become less and less useful over time. There's a balance to be found but in general I agree with WAID above: WikiProjects are first and foremost a group of people. Their categorisation and quality assessment functions are secondary to that, and can be continued in other ways if the need for the WikiProject (the people) is no longer there. – Joe (talk) 10:01, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

If the tools can be continued in other ways, that would make everything much simpler. At the very least, I use Wikipedia:WikiProject Brunei/Article alerts and would be sad to see it gone. CMD (talk) 10:26, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

I would welcome any task forces under the umbrella for WikiProject History, just as one possible option, if that is useful to others here. Sm8900 (talk) 18:11, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, I'm pretty sure that your purpose could be met with a PetScan. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:16, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

PetScan will show me when articles are nominated for various community processes on my watchlist? CMD (talk) 01:24, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

No, it wouldn't appear on your watchlist. But you should be able to construct a query that asks, e.g., for a list of articles in Category:Articles for deletion and Category:Brunei. Compare Article Alerts against this PetScan result, for example. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:49, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Useful then, but not the same purpose. CMD (talk) 03:05, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

section break 2

I mean, I suppose it won't do any harm here, but I think this is basically a rearranging of the deck chairs. There are plenty of WikiProjects with a broad scope comparable to MILHIST or WOMRED that are functionally defunct; I think the long-term success of those two is at least in part stochastic, and I would not expect "aggressive merging" to form a comparably successful project. Over a decade ago, a user attempted a major upmerge of individual US state projects to WikiProject United States, coupled with a fairly aggressive tagging campaign. I didn't notice at the time any particularly sustained upswing in project activity, and the pushback from the state projects that were active enough not to want to be subsumed started that user's spiral towards long-term abuse.

I think it is worth asking why WikiProjects were so active and useful in the early days of en.wikipedia and have undergone such a profound decline. I agree with the above comments about people being first and foremost. *Why*, on an internet full of knowledgeable people, are we unable to attract enough editors to keep these groups staffed and active. I certainly have some ideas, but I'd be curious to know what others think. Choess (talk) 06:04, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

States were maybe not the best test case since, with enwiki's massive American editor base, they tend to be more active than a country of comparable size elsewhere. I don't know why WikiProjects have foundered – I think the fact that we have salami-sliced topics until they can no longer sustain a working group is one plausible explanation, and hence that merging is worth a try. I'd also be interested to hear other ideas and I do really think they're worth saving. My sense is that new editors that might have gotten involved in a WikiProject if they joined when we did are now more likely to end up invested in a 'patrol', because these still have an active community around them. – Joe (talk) 10:15, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

I think that some of the problem is focusing on "topics" when a WikiProject is a "group of people".

IMO people who want to work together will find a way to do that. However, I think three changes have hurt WikiProjects:

lots of salami-sliced topics make it harder to find the other people,
the existence of passable pages for most popular subjects reduces the demand for creating content, and
the way people want to do that, in the present decade, is off wiki.

Merging up people-less pages increases the odds that someone looking for a group will find someone to work with.

When I was a new editor, I saw a link to Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine on an article talk page. When I looked around, I saw requests for help with evidence that those requests were resulting in help. I also saw someone was asking for help on a large but simple task. I thought I could do that, and maybe that would free up other, more experienced editors to do more important things, like creating articles. Some 115K edits later, here I am. I don't think the same thing happens now. You find the pages, but there's nothing going on. If there is anything other than automated announcements, it's some kind of complaint or dispute. It gives you a different view of the group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

We merged a ton of TV related dead projects into WikiProject Television and converted them into task forces a few years ago. They are still dead but at least the tags take less place on talk pages. My thoughts on this are that we shouldn't support for all eternity dead projects or task forces. If no one finds them useful (and by useful, actively engaging with the project or task force; not by looking at the statistics), then support for them should stop - delete banner or task force entry in banner, delete article categories and leave only the main project page and talk pages as an archive. Some editors don't understand that even inactive pages require sometimes quite a lot of maintenance work. Gonnym (talk) 10:31, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

tagging @Joe Roe, the originator of this topic, in case they might wish to comment on any topics here. Sm8900 (talk) 13:22, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

section break 3

Some of this seems like it could be subject to empirical examination: if we look back at the earliest WikiProject archives, are the articles and topics discussed more general or "popular" than at present? Are there a significant number of projects that were once active and have since become quiescent?

I think Wikipedia:WikiProject Banksia might be an interesting study. Founded 2006, a rather niche topic, but consistently produced Featured Articles through 2018 and got about 10% of its articles above "Start"-class, which I think is pretty successful. Maybe I'm just grasping a different part of the elephant, but this is how I think of our content as developing: one or a few very energetic people doing most of the work, probably on a power law distribution, which stimulates less active users to align with that task (say, doing some reference formatting to help a *Banksia* article towards FA, or contributing a few sentences summarizing a relevant paper).

WikiProjects are a group of people sharing a thematic interest. I think the crux of the problem is that we've become increasingly adamantine about refusing to acknowledge that some editors have more knowledge about subject matter than others; the only form of expertise we recognize is "expertise" about our internal rules. Energetically (mis)interpreting policy gives you moderator power over the work of others; energetically interpreting subject matter gets you moderated. Forming a project just creates a bigger target area for people to zoom in and declare that your work is OR, non-notable, fanboyism, etc. Of course our social energy has been diverted to criticism, not creation; that's what we reward. (Happy to take this elsewhere to avoid derailing Joe's concrete proposal—what's our replacement for User talk:Iridescent?) Choess (talk) 19:02, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

@Choess, I don't think there's a replacement for Iri's page, but I'm willing to volunteer his page for this conversation. Alternative, you can have it here (maybe in a new section, and feel free to ping interesting/interested editors). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Shared experiences help bond groups together, establishing a feeling of common purpose. While there is a good reason for Wikipedia not to be a host for general discussion, it means those shared experiences have to come through article editing and related discussion. This was easier to come by when Wikipedia was in a land rush phase, with many eager editors and a need to establish common agreements on article writing conventions, categories, suitable sources, standards for having an article, and so forth. Now that a lot of this has been set up, there is less need for daily discussions on operations. There is still higher level discussions to be had, such as reconciling different standards that were set up by different groups, but typically more abstract discussions garner less interest. Combined with the decrease in long-term editors due to the natural turnover of editors from earlier cohorts and the greater choices of pastimes now available online, more of the current generation of editors never experienced the busy times for their WikiProjects of interest. For new editors today, trying to connect with a group of Wikipedia editors who are mostly heads-down and working steadily away on mundane tasks isn't easy.

One thing I think might help (without opening up WikiProjects to more general forum-like discussion) is to build lists of desired articles or tasks to complete, make them very visible, and get people to check off items as they are done. There's still lots of writing to be done, and having a visible tracking board would generate a bit of that common purpose feel again. For this idea to work, though, it needs some volunteers to help keep the status board current, perhaps generating stats at various checkpoints, and to reach out to editors who seem like good candidates based on their contribution history. Ideally this outreach would be assisted by the new editor mentors. I don't know how much interest there is, but the good news is that it is an initiative that can be managed by a fairly small number of people for any one given topic area. isaacl (talk) 22:24, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/ can do automated leaderboards for certain purposes (e.g., most refs added, most images uploaded to Commons, most words added to an article). That might appeal to some groups. You'd still have to have someone bringing the off-wiki information back to the group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

I think a manual checking off of items would more readily create a shared experience feeling. Automated leaderboards by themselves are just counts. Maybe if they were used to award silly barnstars, it would be appealing to some users and thus foster a bit of esprit de corps. isaacl (talk) 06:25, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Small, achievable tasks are good, especially if everyone can see that multiple editors are involved. Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation sometimes brings lists of dab-needing articles to WPMED, and we usually get a few editors working on them. The Pareto principle applies, but the key point is that people need to feel like someone else needs to pitch in. Having one person do the whole list doesn't make the group feel important. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:41, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's the idea: create a place where people can see the work being done by each person, to help establish common shared experiences. Additionally, help those who want a bit of direction to find tasks that need to be completed. isaacl (talk) 19:00, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

New section for discussion, June 4 2024

I would like to suggest that we resume discussion of this topic, at least for a little while longer. I think that there are some interesting ideas here, perhaps we could discuss further, before this gets archived. I hope to add some comments myself a little later, but first I'd like to read this over, and give this a little thought. thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:28, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

There needs to be general broad fiction genre wikiprojects as targets for merging various small WPPs on individual fictional milieus into. We have WP:SciFi, Horror, Romance, Comedy; but there's no Fantasy/Myth-based/Legend-based, CrimeFic/LawFic/PoliceFic/Detective/Mystery, MilFic/Adventure/Western/Wuxia/Murim/Chanbara; and AltHist is inactive. -- 65.92.244.143 (talk) 23:06, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels would seem to cover this — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:13, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
- If they're not just books, that won't work -- 65.92.244.143 (talk) 21:47, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
  We have a Wikipedia:WikiProject Fictional characters but no WP:WikiProject Fiction. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Musing here. If I felt I had figured out all the kinks around merging Wikiprojects (and I currently do not), I might be happy to propose merging some around topics I have edited where I have observed them being inactive for awhile. I would feel less comfortable jumping into say merging Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of Canada into Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada. This seems twin hurdles others may likely face, potentially stepping on some toes, potentially proposing that someone else does a lot of cleanup. CMD (talk) 13:38, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I have proposed in the past redirecting the talk pages of sub Canada projects like Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography of Canada to Wikipedia talk:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board to no avail. Moxy🍁 19:01, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

The core of my original idea is to making merging easier. There's a consensus to merge five history WikiProjects but I keep opening the merging instructions and then giving up. A lot of the complexity comes from converting the former WikiProjects into taskforces, but nobody in the linked discussion seems to care about that. Is there anyone who has done this before and is up for writing a shorter set of steps for just merging WikiProjects, without creating additional taskforces? – Joe (talk) 10:19, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
i think that merging old wikiprojeects is more trouble than simply marking them as inactive, and then starting a new task force from scratch, for each one. Sm8900 (talk) 12:59, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
@Joe Roe, I think I could do this for you. I've started Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Merging WikiProjects. I still need to sort out the banners/template steps, but please take a look and let me know if this is what you're hoping for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:42, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: That looks great, thanks. I'll try it with the history projects now. Though the templates are of course an important step. – Joe (talk) 09:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

I imagine the intent was to keep separate article alerts for a merged WikiProject. But if the merged WikiProject is inactive and no longer has any active participants, then it's probably better to also merge the article alerts into those for the parent project. isaacl (talk) 17:05, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Exactly. There also needs to be people actively tagging new articles or the article alerts will become progressively less useful over time. – Joe (talk) 09:36, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject mergers and templates

Well, following WhatamIdoing's kindly-provided instructions went well with the history projects until I tried to redirect the obsolete templates to the merged project (given that I'm not merging task forces, that's all the needs to happen), at which point two template editors popped up to object (courtesy ping @MSGJ and Gonnym:). Discussions are taking place at Template talk:WikiProject Ancient Germanic studies#Duplicate banners resulting from merge and Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2024 June 25#Template:WikiProject Ancient Germanic studies – additional input would be very appreciated as I don't actually understand what they're objecting to. – Joe (talk) 07:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

As I've clearly stated in both places. There is a difference between shutting done a project page and redirecting it, and merging a project page into another project. You've claimed you did a merge, when you seem to mean a redirect. In either case, both processes were left incomplete. How to complete them depends on what you actually want, but your last comment wasn't helpful. Gonnym (talk) 07:37, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

They were "left incomplete" because while I was in the middle of doing them MSGJ reverted me and you started a pointless bloody TfD. – Joe (talk) 07:43, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Your edit to the template happened at 10:28, 25 June 2024. MSGJ's edit happened at 14:25, 25 June 2024. My edit happened at 18:03, 25 June 2024. If it takes you more than 4 hours to follow up on an edit to the banner template then you should let someone else do this part. Gonnym (talk) 08:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

@Gonnym, are you volunteering to be that "someone else"? We are in the process of writing step-by-step directions for merging templates. Unfortunately, this does sometimes mean that we reach a certain step and need to stop and figure out what should happen next. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:11, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Either myself or someone else at TfD can do these things, which is why we have WP:TFD/H. Gonnym (talk) 18:33, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Lady Henry Somerset#Requested move 14 July 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Lady Henry Somerset#Requested move 14 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂 • [𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺] 22:39, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

@98Tigerius: I'm struggling to see any relevance to this talk page? – Joe (talk) 13:02, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Merge of inactive education wikiprojects

I'm proposing to merge a number of inactive education-related wikiprojects to WikiProject Education. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Education#Merge of inactive education wikiprojects. – Joe (talk) 17:50, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Merge of inactive higher education wikiprojects

I'm proposing to merge a number of inactive higher education-related wikiprojects to WikiProject Higher education. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Higher education#Merge of inactive higher education wikiprojects. – Joe (talk) 18:08, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

The West Wing task force MfD

You are invited to participate at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/The West Wing task force :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 18:32, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Indigenous peoples

I was surprised that we have two separate projects: WikiProject Indigenous peoples of the Americas and WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America. Perhaps these would be better merged? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:52, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

There's also WikiProject Indigenous peoples of Australia, and none of the three are particularly active. I'd suggest merging them all to WikiProject Indigenous peoples, if not an even broader project (WikiProject Ethnic groups? WikiProject Anthropology?) – Joe (talk) 11:31, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes maybe. Can you post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America#Related WikiProjects because that has generated some discussion? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:24, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

It looks like this proposal is not welcomed by the people most affected by it, and therefore should not proceed at this time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:57, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Finishing WikiProject X on the community wishlist

I imagine many here will remember WikiProject X, a WMF-funded effort to increase the activity [of] WikiProjects and make WikiProjects more central to the experience of editing Wikipedia. Sadly the project was under-resourced and never finished, leaving its work either in a prototype stage (the WPX UI, trialled e.g. at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women's Health) or unmaintained (the automated WikiProject Directory). However in their final report, the WikiProject X team did say that any full properly equipped team could pick this project up and see it through. To that end I've made a request on the community wishlist for the WMF to see if they can equip someone to pick it up. Please comment there if you are interested. – Joe (talk) 13:05, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

@Joe Roe - I'm interested! I have done a lot of work with WikiProject Unreferenced articles and getting help from other projects when struggling to find sources would be tremendously improved by those projects actually being active and useful as resources. The last major update from WikiProject X was in 2015 - I think we're at a very different place in the project's development and hopefully it could be revitalized. Thanks for kicking off the discussion! Kazamzam (talk) 13:34, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

@Kazamzam: Great! If you don't mind voicing your support at meta:Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Finish WikiProject X, it'll be more visible to the people making the decision there :) – Joe (talk) 11:16, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Inactive national history projects

Since my first attempt to merge inactive projects in the history topic was well received, I'm now looking to the remaining inactive projects in Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Directory/History_and_society#History (i.e. almost all of them!) There is a subset that are about the history of modern nation states:

Would it make more sense to propose merging these into Wikiproject History, or to the respective countries (e.g. Australian history into WikiProject Australia)?

Similarly, there's Wikipedia:WikiProject Women's History, which I can see fitting into history, but also into Wikipedia:WikiProject Women, which is more active and organised at the moment. Where's the best place to discuss these kind of issues? – Joe (talk) 13:52, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Question 6 above in the header of this page. But there are probably a heap of caveats that as a long term talk page tagger would in turn ask of the proposer for merges etc. A large amount. As for sense in merging proposals, it would be very useful to look at the history of the processes of the council in the last 18 years or so, and where some over time merges/changes might be looked at for the efficacy of such moves. JarrahTree 02:39, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I will of course propose the merge to the affected wikiprojects; as I did with the last batch. What I'm asking for here is input on which projects to propose it to. – Joe (talk) 08:36, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I previously converted Wikipedia:WikiProject Philippine History into Wikipedia:Tambayan Philippines/Philippine history task force; as broad as country wikiprojects can be they're less broad than all of history. CMD (talk) 08:49, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

@Joe Roe, you could ask on each talk page. I'd suggest recommending one over the other (not necessarily the same for every group), but if anyone responds, their preferences should be taken into account. I think I lean towards the individual country when that is a large or very active group, but WikiProject History when the country-specific group is small. The potential targets could be notified in a "Help us make a decision about merging here vs the other option" way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:25, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

i appreciate the ideas for adding some of these to WikiProject History. if i can assist, please let me know. thanks! Sm8900 (talk) 13:41, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Several recently-created WikiProjects nominated for deletion

Please see the discussions at:

– Joe (talk) 15:09, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm seeing a post elsewhere about the recent creation of Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris. I thought it would merit mention in this section because I find no evidence that the council was consulted on its creation. It appears to be yet another knee-jerk reaction to news headlines, destined to enjoy a short shelf life. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 01:42, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I suspect so. Maybe it's time to revise the guidance in Wikipedia:WikiProject#Creating and maintaining a project, i.e. to say "don't create a new wikiproject, look for an existing one to join or revive". – Joe (talk) 10:03, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I've copied the text from the proposals page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:06, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Turns out it's a pattern; the same editor created Wikipedia:WikiProject Joe Biden, Wikipedia:WikiProject Donald Trump and Wikipedia:WikiProject Hillary Clinton. I've nominated all four for deletion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris. – Joe (talk) 15:09, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Noting the utility of the Wikiproject categories was raised at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Kamala Harris. Broadly, the question here is how/why Category:WikiProject Joe Biden differs from Category:Joe Biden, and if the functions of the first can be shifted to the second. CMD (talk) 10:54, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for noting this Chipmunkdavis. It has come up a few times when I've been proposing wikiproject merges and deletions.

I think the major obstacle to decoupling tools like article alerts from is that mainspace categories are highly nested, so you have to be really careful how you specify the scope or you'll get all sorts of tangential stuff included. For example Category:Joe Biden contains Category:Presidency of Joe Biden which contains Category:COVID-19 pandemic in the United States which contains... a lot of stuff not related to Joe Biden. What makes WikiProject categories attractive is that they're 'flat': Category:WikiProject Joe Biden articles contains articles about Joe Biden and nothing else, and you can rest assured that nobody is likely to drop all of Category:WikiProject COVID-19 articles into it. The major downside of course is that these lists must be manually generated and maintained and quickly deteriorate if the wikiproject becomes inactive.

But as it happens I've just learned that Harej is working on an solution to this very problem: Wikipedia:Pagesets, a way of creating automatically updated flat lists of articles. There's a great explanation of how these could fit into a revitalised wikiproject system on his blog. – Joe (talk) 11:59, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis, you can set up a 'watchlist' with any arbitrary list of pages. For example:

That won't sort a list that says "Categories for discussion" on it, but it would let you find all the edits nominating the pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

That is useful, but very few Wikiprojects will have the ability to maintain such a list. Could a bot maintain such a list based on word recognition? Sounds like a lot of computation. Could a tag similar to a taskforce tag be used without creating a taskforce page? It's really an interesting problem, that the social function of Wikipedia developed fast enough that functionality began to depend on it, and now that that social element has decreased, or at least changed, the functionality is stuck. We're on a particular mountain in a fitness landscape. Wikipedia:Pagesets does seem like what we might be looking for, creating a parallel system rather than grafting something on the existing one (not stuck on the same fitness landscape mountain). I'll have to read it more closely another time to see how responsiveness is being considered. CMD (talk) 16:24, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Share examples of WikiProjects or collaborations that you have worked on

Hi Wikimedians!

The Campaigns Product and Programs Teams at the Wikimedia Foundation wants to learn more about WikiProjects and other on-wiki collaborations work. We would like to do more work that improves the quality of collaborations onwiki. We especially need examples of WikiProjects and other collaborations that have worked on different Wikimedia projects. Please help us by filling out a short survey on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campaigns/WikiProjects

Never participated in a WikiProject or other collaborations, but have ideas on how we could make collaboration better? You can also share feedback on the talk page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Campaigns/WikiProjects

Please share the survey with anyone you think would help us have valuable insights, we are particularly looking for successful collaborations on non-English wikis. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I believe Rosiestep could offer useful background on Women in Red and its non-English extensions, and perhaps other collaborative initiatives.--Ipigott (talk) 10:47, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

WikiProject Women's sport

Women's sport has been discussed on the talk page of WP Women in Red. It has been suggested that the project is widely used and highly active. It should therefore no longer be listed as "inactive".--Ipigott (talk) 10:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

I marked it as inactive a few weeks ago, based primarily on the fact that there hasn't been a substantial discussion on its talk page for over a year and that participants do not appear to be coordinated collaborative efforts in any other ways. I can see from the WT:WOMRED discussion that you said you use it reviewing and assessing articles and that its template is used on many articles. I'm not sure that translates to widely-used and highly active. The purpose of a wikiproject is to facilitate a group of people engaging in collaborative editing; the system of tagging and assessing articles is supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

You can change it back to active if you want, but I don't think that will change anything about the reality. It seems to me that this and most of the ~20 other projects on specific subsets of biographies of women are struggling to maintain activity levels and could benefit from being consolidated into a less niche group. Perhaps WiR, as one of the stand-out examples of a successful wikiproject, could be a focus point for this? Preserving the merged wikiprojects as task force would mean their tagging and assessment functions would remain essentially unchanged, though as discussed above a better long term solution would be to develop categorisation and monitoring tools that don't depend on an otherwise moribund wikiproject. – Joe (talk) 12:18, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

It's possible that this particular group will have intermittent activity (e.g., during the Olympics). I do think that merging it as a task force has significant possibilities. In particular, that would maintain separate 1.0 stats for anyone who uses that to choose subject areas (though independent means would be better), and the talk page could be redirected to the main page, so that people asking for help would actually get responses. Wikipedia:WikiProject Women might be a more willing target than Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red, since it is more generic (though distinctly less active).

I have removed the idea of assessment as an indicator of group activity from Template:WikiProject status/doc. With the switch to sitewide assessment, it's become irrelevant. Articles get assessed regardless of whether the group is assessing them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Out of all the projects listed in the WiR sidebar, only Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Religion and the recently created Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women Do News show more than one reply in the past few years, if that. CMD (talk) 01:47, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Merge of business and companies WikiProjects

Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Business#Merge of business and companies WikiProjects. – Joe (talk) 18:20, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

This proposal was made more than 30 days ago, and anything that was agreed to could be implemented now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:23, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

Michelin Guide task force

A few of us have created Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink/Michelin Guide task force

Inviting others to join or otherwise help improve this project's infrastructure. Thanks! ---Another Believer _(Talk) 23:32, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Climbing#Suggesting a change of WP:WikiProject Climbing/Article recommendations

Discussion on a project guideline, if you have an opinion, please join. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:08, 31 August 2024 (UTC)