User:Doncram/AskForLiaisons

(drafted with intent to post at wt:DPL) Possible changes:
 * revise to make this a joint request from two or more, not individually from doncram?
 * revise to serve as a request at an individual's talk page, instead?
 * work on tools more first, request help linking CatScan to a toolserver report like JaGa's, before this?
 * touch base with programmers RnB JaGa Dispenser Magnus who else, first? (Head off any misunderstanding of complaint from this request's mentions of tools needed or of tool modifications needed)
 * simplify to drop all detail about tools?
 * ask whether liaisons have been done before, what do people think, in general first?
 * if just need a few "Liaisons" to run trials with tools, don't ask everyone at wt:DPL to consider. touch base with developers first, so that testing examines possible improvements beyond features that can be made available with little problem.

[begin Ask For Liaisons] Would a few people be willing to serve as Liaison to a WikiProject or two, to get their experts to do disambiguation in their area?
 * Liaisons to WikiProjects

Why?
 * to get a chunk of difficult disambiguation done
 * to educate and involve more editors in the general task of disambiguating
 * to help me and others test and improve upon approaches to working with experts

Background: I have already worked with a few WikiProjects to ask their experts to fix dablinks within their WikiProject's articles. That has worked well, I think mainly because of the specific people involved in those WikiProjects, and because the requested action for them seemed finite and doable and worthwhile enough for them to want to take it on. For example wp:Ships had 96 dablinks and eliminated them all; wp:Canada is about halfway through its 255. It also seems to matter whether that I had friends and some past productive involvement in the WikiProjects.

Toolwise, I have so far been advising the editors to use DabSolver, new to most of them it seems. And I cobbled up a way to use CatScan to make a worklist for them. The targeting so far is simply for articles "owned" by the WikiProject, i.e. for which they have a banner on the Talk page. The worklist names the articles having dablinks (but not the dablinks themselves) together with a "FIX" option for each article that brings up DabSolver applied to it.

(Aside: It would be better if the worklist could also show the dablinks involved. The worklist currently serves to attract persons who are experts on the topic of the articles.  While it is not all bad for them to try to fix dablinks that turn out to be unrelated to their expertise, it would seem better to let them focus on selected combinations of article topic and ambiguous terms.  An idea: maybe having the experts use LinkClassifier, which I only just learned of myself, would help them focus more quickly on what they can improve in an article, reducing that problem perhaps.)

There would be other approaches that Liaisons could help with, like getting experts to look at inbound dablinks to technical terms in their area. I think I could cobble together a way to generate a customized list of dabs and corresponding dab-fix-list links, for any expertise area that can be defined using article categories and/or WikiProject banners.

A Liaison to a wikiproject could help it through a disambiguation exercise or two now, and hopefully build some trust and interest so that the local experts would be willing to help again in the future.

Any comments welcome. --[signature] [end Ask For Liaisons]