Wikipedia:WikiProject Basketball/Task forces and sub-projects

This page provides a list of WikiProject Basketball related task forces and sub-projects and instructions on how interested editors can create a task force.

Please also update the WikiProject directory when adding or removing sub-projects or task forces on this page.

United States and Canada

 * WikiProject College Basketball – talk
 * WikiProject National Basketball Association – talk
 * Boston Celtics – talk (Task force)
 * Chicago Bulls – talk (Task force)
 * Cleveland Cavaliers – talk (Task force)
 * Dallas Mavericks – talk (Task force)
 * Los Angeles Lakers – talk (Task force)
 * Miami Heat – talk (Task force)
 * New York Knicks – talk (Task force)
 * Phoenix Suns – talk (Task force)
 * WNBA – talk (Task force)
 * WikiProject National Basketball League of Canada – talk

Australia

 * WikiProject Australian basketball – talk

Women

 * Women's basketball – talk (Task force)

Why create taskforces
WikiProject Basketball prefers the use of task forces to sub-projects Task forces allow editors to focus on creating and improving articles related to their narrower focus (e.g. editing Women's basketball articles only).

In practice, this means that a group of 10–20 editors will come together to improve a number of articles relating to their special interest without having to spend needless hours creating project pages, assessment departments and deciding on formatting issues.

WikiProject Basketball prefers the use of task forces to sub-projects. As the majority of spin-offs and other collaborations relating to basketball will be using the same stub templates, talk page banners and manual of style, a separate project is not needed. In fact, a separate project that uses so much of WP:BASKETBALL's infrastructure would be a task force in all but name.

By creating task forces and integrating them into the projects talk page banner, WikiProject Basketball, the amount of clutter on talk pages is also minimised.

Another good reason for the preference of task forces over projects is that of communication. Projects on Wikipedia frequently fail to let others know what they are doing, what proposals are being made, what consensus has changed. Sometimes this can cause a lot of conflict, especially over notability or manual of style changes. By bringing everyone together and providing them with a centralised discussion point we hope to avoid this and help to keep everyone informed and aware of what's happening in our field of interest. We wish to avoid the 'them and us' feeling that can exist between large projects and their children.

Why do you have sub-projects if you prefer task forces
This arose mainly due to the fact that the majority of our sub-projects were up and running before we thought task forces would be a better way of arranging things.

Some sub-projects are in the process of reaching a consensus to be turned into task forces, some are inactive and their status can be changed at any time, others already have their own associated bureaucracy and guidelines so this may take a lot of discussion. Not every sub-project wishes to lose its independence.

Other sub-projects were created without prior discussion, we cannot fault them in their enthusiasm for creating a new collaboration area – new ideas, new areas of focus and interested editors are something all projects welcome. WikiProject Basketball would welcome them as a task force if a consensus was reached (you can start a discussion on our main talk page if you would like your sub-project to be turned into a task force).

We're trying to bring all related sub-projects under one talkpage banner and help everyone create, edit and improve all basketball related articles, it's not something that will happen quickly – it's our three-point field goal.

Creating task forces
''Creating a task force involves a great deal of work, and is very time-consuming to reverse if an inappropriate or misnamed group is created. It is generally inadvisable to create task forces without prior discussion—particularly regarding the name and scope—on the project's main talk page.''

Please read this section carefully before creating a new taskforce. WikiProject Basketball currently has a number of inactive or dormant task forces and sub-projects, this guide may help you in suggesting or creating a task force that will remain active.

What is a task force?
A taskforce is a collection of editors who are part of a larger project who wish to focus on one aspect of this to improve a certain area.

Task forces still rely on the main project for manuals of style, assessment and project-wide discussion. They do not necessarily create their own bureaucracy.

Determining scope
You must decide on the particular area of basketball that the task force will focus on. The subject must be large enough to attract enough interested participants but small enough that editors are not overwhelmed with tasks. Conversely, the scope can not be so small that only a few editors are interested in the topic. You may find that creating a task force that deals with a particular country to be the ideal starting point, additional sub-task forces can be created later if needed (i.e. focusing solely on a particular league or club) by following this guideline again. You can adjust your scope at any time but it is best to determine from the beginning what you intend to do.

Determining editor interest
a good number to start a task force with is five people Before creating a task force you must find out if it would be useful and attract enough editors to stay active. To do this you should list your proposal at WikiProject Council/Proposals and also post a message on the project's main talk page informing the community of your suggestion. To gauge interest you should also post on the community noticeboards relating to your topic linking to your proposal (i.e. if you are proposing a task force on Women's basketball then you may wish to post a notice to WikiProject Women).

The Guide on task forces states that "a good number to start a task force with is five people; it may not be effective until it reaches 10 or so people", if your proposal doesn't meet this level of interest – consider adjusting the scope of the suggestion or waiting a number of months before re-submitting the idea again, interest in basketball topics rises around the beginning of the World Cup and other major competitions.

If your proposal equals or exceeds the above level of stated interest and there is a consensus for its creation, follow the instructions below.

Creating task force pages
Do not create task force pages until there is both interest and a consensus for creation Determine who the parent projects are – in most cases this will be WikiProject Basketball only but task forces can share parents with multiple projects (A task force on Women's basketball could be related to WikiProject Women as well).

Create a page for the task force at WikiProject Basketball/TASKFORCENAME task force using the layout below –

Welcome to the TASKFORCENAME of WikiProject Basketball.

Scope
The TASKFORCENAME covers...
 * area

To do

 * Tag related articles to include the TASKFORCELABEL=yes parameter
 * Review importance and quality of existing articles
 * Identify articles for creation
 * Identify articles for improvement
 * Recruit interested Wikipedians

Guidelines
All created articles should follow both the Project Manual of Style and Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

Tagging and assessment
Any articles that are within the scope of this project should be tagged with the WikiProject Basketball banner. You should add  as this will automatically put the page in the appropriate categories.

The script at User_talk:Outriggr/metadatatest.js may be useful in tagging and assessing articles.

Templates
For main project templates, see WikiProject Basketball/Templates

Userbox template
There is a userbox available for participants in the TASKFORCENAME. To add the box to your userpage or talkpage simply add the following into the appropriate place;.

Infobox templates
Use the templates provided at WikiProject Basketball's infobox list.

Stub templates
Use the templates provided at WikiProject Basketball's stub template list.

Resources
Once this page has been created, add to the talk page too.

Please do not replace the WikiProject Basketball navigation template with a bespoke one unless you have multiple pages specific to your task force to link to. The navigation toolbar links everyone to the same resources and central discussion areas.

Update the WikiProject Council Directory by adding your task force underneath WikiProject Basketball.

Publicising the task force
Standard methods for publicising the task force include leaving messages on related notice boards and inviting editors who have edited in-scope articles via their talk page. Adding your task force to the Portal is also a good move in attracting interested editors, so is advertising its creation on Template:Announcements/Community bulletin board under "Project pages seeking contributors".

Some task forces and projects create their own userboxes for placement on user pages. In addition, you can also add a banner advert to Template:Wikipedia ads.

Under no circumstances should you spam your task force across Wikipedia

Adding assessment functions
The assessment functions of the task force and main project are contained within the talk page banner and the assessment subcategories. The banner automatically places articles within these categories depending on their rating. A bot produces reports on all additions and changes to these ratings every three days and creates a statistic table.

Firstly, you should decide if the addition of assessment functions to the task force is necessary, task forces that do not focus predominately on the creation of articles (such as a cleanup task force focusing on MoS changes) do not need to be added to the talk page banner.

The addition of a task force to the project template allows assessment statistics to be created and notifies readers of articles that the page is being supported by a particular task force. It aids in the advertising of the project and allows ratings to be logged for Wikipedia Version 1.0 assessments. It should not be used purely to categorise articles or become a "we support more articles than you nyer nyer nyer" badge of honour.

Creating assessment categories
For assessment to work correctly, you need to create the categories associated with your task force. As a worked example, a "Task force on Women's basketball" would need to create the following subcategories –


 * Category:Women's basketball task force articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Women's basketball articles by importance
 * With the content


 * Category:High-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Low-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Mid-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Top-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:NA-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Unknown-importance Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Women's basketball articles by quality
 * With the content


 * Category:A-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:B-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:C-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:FA-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:FL-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:GA-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:List-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:NA-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content -- This category contains articles that have been marked by WikiProject Basketball. Articles are automatically added to the appropriate sub-categories based on parameters in the project template.


 * Category:Start-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Stub-Class Women's basketball articles
 * With the content


 * Category:Unassessed Women's basketball articles
 * With the content

The  parameter is very important, this is the term that the Wikipedia 1.0 assessment bot will use to log, categorise and post statistics on the articles tagged by your task force. This is why all these categories are in the form  (e.g.  ).

Adding the task force to the project banner
Once the above categories have been created, you can prepare the task force's code that will added to WikiProject Basketball. As the template is protected, you must test your code first and ensure it is correct before requesting its addition.

The following example shows the sections of code which would relate to the  section of the template. The category names should be the same as those entered above

|tf 1={{lc:{{{women|{{{women|}}}}}} |TF_1_LINK           = Wikipedia:WikiProject Basketball/Women's basketball task force |TF_1_NAME           = the Women's basketball task force |TF_1_IMAGE           = EVD-baloncesto-032.jpg |TF_1_SIZE           = 42px |TF_1_NESTED         = Women's  |TF_1_QUALITY         = yes |TF_1_IMPORTANCE     = yes |tf 1 importance    = {{{importance|}}} |TF_1_ASSESSMENT_CAT = Women's basketball articles |TF_1_MAIN_CAT       = WikiProject Women's basketball articles All code is case-sensitive, and you must replace "TF_1" with the number after the last taskforce on the template, e.g. "TF_10".

You can request the change is made to the template. To do this follow the instructions at the top of Template talk:WikiProject Basketball and provide a link to your sandbox version of the template. Explain your changes as succinctly as possible.

When the edit has been completed by an administrator, ensure that the template documentation has also be updated at Template:WikiProject Basketball/doc.

Tagging articles
Tag a few article talk pages using the template and include appropriate assessments. Before browsing away from the articles' talk pages, though, double-check that appropriate categories appear on the talk page. If they don't, chances are that you wrote class=start instead of class=Start when tagging – capitalisation matters! These taggings will provide some test data, so you can check that everything is working.

Wait until the bot does its run (once in every three days), or visit this web form and run the bot right away. You should see a new row for your task force in the table in the main index. The bot will also generate the other output automatically; after it does, check that the tagged talk pages have appeared as expected before assessing the rest of your task force's pages.

You should only tag articles that are within the scope of your task force

Adding statistics to the task force page
Every three days a bot will trawl through the Wikipedia database and update the Wikipedia Version 1.0 assessment statistics. It will then create a table and log that you can examine, link to or display on your task force page.

The statistics box is added with the code (using the previous example)

You should provide a link under this box to

The bot can be ran manually via this webform (with the category "Women's basketball" for the above example) but be warned that it can take a long time to run through all 20,000+ basketball articles.

If a task force grows dormant
Some task forces grow dormant or inactive naturally when their work has been completed (such as a task force focusing on one competition), others grow inactive due to lack of editor interest or become too intent on tagging instead of editing and improving articles.

Becoming inactive isn't necessarily a bad thing, as a dormant task force can be restarted at any time. One of the benefits of using task forces over sub-projects is that if a sub-project with its own bureaucracy and talkpage banners becomes inactive then its pages would possibly need reintegrating into the main project, which would most likely involve members trying to retag thousands of talkpages.

Ultimately, the task force pages can be marked as inactive and the WikiProject Basketball variables relating to it can be commented out or removed.

Conversely, if you wish to re-inject a dormant task force with some life, go ahead – be bold!