Wikipedia talk:WikiProject ListMakers

Discussion of the WikiProject from Unint and MrZaius talk pages

Since you've edited this list considerably, I was wondering if you had any opinions as to what could be done to clean it up, deal with all the red links with no annotations (and possible non-notable items), and generally ensure that all the entries are actually on-topic. I've raised some concerns previously on the talk page, for reference. –Unint 23:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Dropped some comments into Talk:List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, per your request. You know, if there's enough people like me that get obsessive over maintaining these non-category lists, it might warrant a WikiProject. Threw the bones of one up during/after my near-all-nighter harvesting the data for List of Nuclear Holocaust fiction from Jericho (TV series), The Day After, and Threads, all of which had largely duplicated the list above. Wikipedia:WikiProject ListMakers - Interested? MrZaius^talk 01:21, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

As luck would have it, I am currently also trying to decide whether a different list, currently at AfD, can be improved... Does that make me someone bona fide interested in lists? Caretaking for any one list can be, as you've shown, a gargantuan task requiring either knowledge or extensive research (which is why I was watching for editors on this one intently), so I don't suppose you're looking for a task force that will deal with any list regardless of subject. (I haven't seen many strongly active maintenance-based WikiProjects as opposed to subject-based ones, but correct me if I'm wrong.) What kind of project structure did you have in mind? –Unint 02:20, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Having never participated in a WikiProject, I didn't give any concious thought to structure, but I was thinking primarily of just setting up some shared space where we could list three things:

1: Massively overblown See Also sections that need to be broken out into seperate articles.

2: Lists like ours that just need cleanup, hopefully attracting editors more interested in interlinking topics than authoring large swathes of content.

However, as you say, there do not seem to be many guidelines for the manufacture and syntax of such lists. The closest thing is the only tangentially related, and, in this case, probably inapplicable Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works), which seems more related to the highly stylized episode lists. An organized group of Wikipedians with overlapping interests may be able to hammer out usable general guidelines for lists not covered by the aforelinked. We could provide some generic guidance to those asking questions like the ones posed in the talk page for

If this could be better dealt with by an existing project or through some other mechanism with which I am unfamiliar, I'd be very much interested in bugging/using them. I note that an External Links project exists, but none exist for the maintnance of See Also sections. Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout#See_also - The project primarily was created/proposed when I got myself into a huff over the degree to which the See Also sections were swallowing up the articles mentioned elsewhere, and were largely breaking with the style guide by providing lengthy descriptors. As such, it might be advisable to propose a task force within some other project, such as the (possibly dead?) project for Wikipedia:WikiProject_Linkification.

In the long term, I would love to dust off my coding skills and find a way to compare the length of any given article against the length of its See Also section, allowing automated flagging of articles in need attention.

However, the idea may have simply been unnecessary/untenable. Any thoughts would certainly be welcomed. My apologies for the unruliness & length of my response. MrZaius^talk 03:22, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Getting in touch with interested editors is clearly the starting step. Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals is the usual place to gauge interest before a project goes "live", though I'm not sure how many people frequent that page. For another WikiProject I've seen start up recently, it definitely took contacting editors directly to get them to sign that page. The best idea I have would be to look through edit histories for various lists, to obtain a list of potential contacts. –Unint 03:54, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Especially featured lists. –Unint 04:17, 24 February 2007 (UTC)