User:Noraft/Contributions

Project space contributions

 * Started List of Discussion Templates

Policy & guideline contributions

 * Major change to Articles for deletion/Common outcomes after I noticed it was no longer simply reporting common outcomes of Afd discussions (taking a descriptive role), but actually "laying down the law" as to how certain subjects should be dealt with (taking a prescriptive role, effectively acting like a policy or guideline). So I overhauled it so that it only described common outcomes. This significantly weakened its prescriptive influence over Afd (i.e. people were less likely to say "Delete per OUTCOMES," and when that does happen, there is a stronger defense against such a !vote rationale.)


 * Minor guideline change to WP:MOS where I added foreign character warning boxes to the Manual of Style (lead section).

Wikiproject contributions

 * Coordinated for the first three Copyediting Backlog Elimination Drives resulting the backlog being shortened by over two years with over 3,000 articles being cleared.


 * Revamp of WikiProject Essays. It was an abandoned project when I found it. I saw all the essays as being in a poorly sorted pile, with editors having little idea of which essays were actually influential and which were little read. So I started by designing a project banner and then tagging every essay I could find (about a thousand) with AWB. This is why both my automated edit count and my project talk space edit counts are disproportionate. Then I created about a dozen categories to differentiate various essay types. Then, I developed an "impact scale" (a mask of the importance scale) based on a weighted mix of watchers, page views, and incoming links. We got some interesting data from this: we learned that 90% of essays are very sparsely read, while only about 1% are very widely read/cited. There were also some surprises, with some essays being less influential than expected, and some being more. Working with MSGJ (talk) who did the technical work, I got a bot to crawl every page with our Wikiproject Banner and assign an impact rating. Now editors can see which essays have the most impact on Wikipedia by checking out essay talk pages.