Wikipedia talk:Featured Article Help Desk/Archive 1

History of Arizona
History of Arizona has successfully made Featured Article status. Congratulations have to go to Toothpaste for her efforts on this one. Someone give her a barnstar. Rob Church Talk 04:13, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Resources
A list of useful resources and tutorials on advanced editing topics can now be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Featured Article Drive/Resources. Please feel free to add to this. Rob Church Talk 22:41, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Participants

 * An active participant is one who is contributing to a current effort by proposing or completing tasks or other significant contributions as part of his/her involvement in the project.
 * An inactive participant is a new participant, or a participant who does not appear to have made a significant contribution to any current effort as part of his/her involvement in the project in the past two weeks.
 * Inactive participants will be removed after a reasonable time period of inactivity.

Nominations for Future Efforts

 * Active participants may nominate up to two articles at any given time as proposed future efforts
 * Inactive participants may nominate one article at any given time as a proposed future effort
 * Nominations may be added, edited or retracted at any time

Improvement of FARC'd articles
Basically, I propose that since we're trying to improve count and quality on WP:FA, we should work on improving FARC'd articles, to keep both count and quality preserved. - A Link to the Past (talk) 23:20, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

Support

 * 1) A Link to the Past (talk) 23:20, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Magicmonster 13:33, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) --Cool Cat Talk 22:52, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Comment

 * Comment - A link to WP:FARC might be useful. Rob Church Talk 11:17, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Comment - I agree that improving WP:FARC articles would be great to work toward improving Wikipedia, but how do you improve count for WP:FA? It always goes up by one per day.Magicmonster 13:33, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I think he's referring to us increasing the number of Featured Articles that are available to be placed on the Main Page, whereas you're referring to those that are/have been on the Main Page. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I understand you so far. Rob Church Talk 08:38, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Problem
A number of participants have resorted to working on their individual FAC nominations as of late. While this is fine, not a lot is being done with our current efforts. We also have the problem that participants with little or no interest in the current efforts will probably not be able or willing to contribute from time to time.

Solution
The Featured Article Drive ought to convert it's role to that of a help desk; any user can request our help to get articles through the FAC process. This would be especially useful for newer users, who are often keen to find their feet in contributing, but can be daunted by the formal review process. Our role would be to act as editing assistants during that time, providing tips on how to edit better, and indeed, doing some of the work ourselves. I propose that, in addition, we form a link of some description with the Mediation Cabal, to provide a pleasant and informal means of resolving any disputes that those users might have with individuals during the FAC process.

If this proposal is passed, the project page and talk page will be redesigned to take our new role into account; providing spaces for participant details and selected skills, for users to ask for our help (and for us to respond) and to keep tabs on the project.

Our IRC channel will continue to be useful throughout this role, although the concept of a regular meeting is somewhat deprecated by the new role. Having said that, I can't see that meetings were working brilliantly anyway, so perhaps this new focus will help spark some renewed interest with our participants.

Existing participants would be more than welcome to leave the project if they do not wish to help us achieve the new goals, and to form their own forks. Participants are of course also welcome to remain on-project, and to help us (and our visiting users) with whatever comes along, in any way that they can. Participants are also welcome to ask for help in their own, individual FACs.


 * Rob Church Talk 09:56, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Support

 * 1) I agree with the changes. My interest and knowledge is limited, so I could not contributes to most effort. I prefere to work on subject that I know and interested in.--Kiba 21:12, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Hmmm I would agree to that. --Cool Cat Talk 22:51, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|15px]] Extreme lesbian support! -- Phroziac (talk) 00:39, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) Fine by me. Ambi 08:40, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
 * 5) Pretty much all I did is work on my own stuff with little help from the FAD group. I believe this is a good idea. Zach (Sound Off) 20:54, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Comments

 * Comment - this proposal was drawn up by A Link to the Past and Rob Church.
 * Comment - I obviously don't want to rush consensus un-necessarily, but this is now dragging on and if we're going to get the project back together, we need to know what we're doing with it. If people don't want to change direction, that's fine, but I'd appreciate some clearer consensus hee. Rob Church Talk 23:09, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Featured Article Drive Logo
The Featured Article Drive logo, shown on the main page, is attributed to Rob Church. Please see the image description page for information on licensing and using this image.

Featured article advice
Since I'm going on a Wikibreak (temporary, I promise), I've written a page up detailing the most common failings that pages nominated to FAC have and a little expansion on the featured article criteria that I think is important for people to be aware of before nominating an article at FAC and especially for reviewers to read before giving advice. So I thought that would be valuable for you guys at this project as you are working to produce featured articles. I've put the advice together based on my more than a year of experience with a good portion of the FAC nominations over that time and from many discussions about the criteria. Like I explain there, if more editors were familiar with how articles should be written to pass the FA criteria, not only would more articles pass, but I think more would be nominated too. If we have more consistency about what advice is given less time would be wasted and more effort would be going in the right direction. So if others substantially agree with the advice or a version of it that can be agreed on, I suggest all potential FAC and Peer reviewers be directed towards it before reviewing articles, and that every FAC and PR nom get the advice contained there. Thanks all, it's certainly been fun so far. - Taxman Talk 15:12, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

New listing
Participants in this project may be interested in Most visited articles as a source for nominations. -- Beland 02:52, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Featured article review
I don't know if you were already aware of this, but there is a new component of the FA process called Featured article review, where featured articles are looked over to determine if they are still worthy of FA (a step between FA and FA removal). Currently, there is little or no activity, notably for articles under active review. Pentawing 00:38, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Rhodesia
Folks, templates have got the better of me - can someone remove the duplicate Rhodesia entry ? Sorry. Wizzy&hellip; &#9742;   08:16, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Figured out what I did - fixed it - thanks. Wizzy&hellip; &#9742;   08:21, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Scientific peer review
I have made a suggestion at WikiProject Science and wonder what the users of this page think. --Oldak Quill 17:14, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

A scientific peer review has been started and we're looking for Wikipedians who are members of the scientific academic community to run for the board. If you want to give it a shot come over and post a little about yourself. New nominations are being accepted until the 00:00 on the 17th March.

The project aims to combine existing peer review mechanisms (Wikipedia peer review, featured article candidate discussion, article assessment, &c.) which focus on compliance to manual of style and referencing policy with a more conventional peer review by members of the scientific academic community. It is hoped that this will raise science-based articles to their highest possible standards. Article quality and factual validity is now Wikipedia's most important goal. Having as many errors as Britannica is not good–we must raise our standards above this. --Oldak Quill 18:02, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Exellent
I think it is truly exelent that their are people out there with enough initative to start something like this and perhaps when I am more familair with the process, I will join you. Perhaps though, you should consider changing the waiting time for help from 1-2 Days to an indefinte period. If you need help with any less complicted work, don't feel any hesitation to ask me. Thanks, Dfrg.m s c 1. 2 . 3 10:26, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 13:41, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 18:46, 30 December 2006 (UTC)