Wikipedia talk:Maintenance collaboration of the week

Initial discussion
Copying following from Village Pump and the Community Portal talk page. Maurreen (talk) 04:14, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia-related collaboration
I noticed that some content in the wikipedia: namespace and quite some self-related content in the article namespace could use some collaboration, and am starting to devellop the idea of a Wikipedia-related collaboration. Are there any people interested? Circeus 17:42, July 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * Good idea, if enough are interested. See WikiProject Wikipedia Namespace. I would be willing to help. A related possibility is a "Maintenance" COTW, which could work on the Wikipedia namespace and various backlogs, such as clearing VFDs, categorizing, article cleanup, and RFCs. Maurreen (talk) 16:01, 30 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Great Ideas. CG 05:34, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia talk:Community Portal

Wikification week?
I've heard some of the other-language projects occasionally declare periods of collaboration on particular backlogs. Several people on en seem to have proposed that we do such a thing, but not much has come of these suggestions. Our wikification backlog seems like a good candidate, since it's gotten quite large, and almost anyone can participate, whether or not they're familiar with article content. So, would anyone object if I added this box to the top of the Community Portal for the appropriate period? Feel free to improve it if you like. -- Beland 04:05, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I moved the code to Template:wiki-week (which is what is now shown above), and am adding it to the portal now. -- Beland 00:34, 31 July 2005 (UTC)


 * OK, I'm starting Maintenance collaboration. See you there. Maurreen (talk) 04:02, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Next wiki-week
starting a discussion as to what will be the next wiki week. Circeus 00:47, July 31, 2005 (UTC)


 * Category:Articles to be merged is also absolutely overflowing, and I was pondering whether or not it should be the subject of the next declaration. It does take a bit longer to merge articles, though, and sometimes having some clue about the subject helps.  Plus "merge month" is pleasantly alliterative.  But a week might be enough time to devote to a single cause.  I was also wondering whether there should only be one "wiki week" per month, to give people a rest.  Kind of like how there's only one "bug day" a week for bugzilla collaboration.  There are some other backlogs that I can think of, like cleanup or expansion.  But I think it would be most efficient to wait on those until someone has a chance to go through the existing lists and purge the entries that have already been fixed.  Requested articles of one kind or another might be good for the second-next wiki week though...I think it's more important to tidy up the articles we already have before making new ones.  Especially because we want to avoid the duplication of effort which results from having two versions of the same content sitting around. -- Beland 02:35, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Why don't we create a page similar to the Collaboration of the Week, where suggestions on wiki-weeks (If that's what you call it) are voted and picked in the end of the week? CG 08:06, August 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * I actually made this proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Wikipedia-related collaboration. Maybe we should continue the discussion there? Circeus 14:39, August 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * OK, I'm starting Maintenance collaboration. See you there. Maurreen (talk) 04:04, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

End of copied material. Maurreen (talk) 04:16, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Voting method
I don't think it's necessary to have nominations "expire" if they don't get enough votes. If a maintenance backlog has been cleared (which seems unlikely), it can be de-listed, either during voting or when the end of the week comes around. Expirations make maintaining the nominations page a lot more work, and people have to keep re-nominating things that need to get done. Maintenance projects are usually important, but neglected, and not very popular (and thus attract few advocates). Given the relatively small number of maintenance categories (compared to say, the number of articles) I don't think there will be a very long list of them. Basically, we have what's in Category:Wikipedia maintenance and what's on Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects. I'll tweak the project page to make the system that we simply chug through the nominees, in order of popularity. Winners are of course to be removed. I would even support automatically re-nominating them (starting over with zero votes) if they still have more than a week's worth of work on them after their time is up. -- Beland 23:32, 3 August 2005 (UTC)


 * OK. I like your changes. Maurreen (talk) 03:09, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

First week a success
Yay, we helped wikify about 500 articles, clearing about a quarter of the backlog in that category! -- Beland 00:30, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Cleanup/September
(I moved this nomination here because this page has been emptied, but the associated status updates shown below are still relevant. -- Beland 00:44, 7 August 2005 (UTC))


 * Nominated August 3 2005


 * Support:
 * 1) Maurreen (talk) 07:40, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Comments:
 * From 2004. Forgot sig earlier. Maurreen (talk) 03:06, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I think new editors would probably flounder and waste a lot of time if presented with a list of already-mostly-fixed problems such as this. There are a few alternatives I might suggest:
 * If I do the promised Pearle run to date-sort Category:Wikipedia cleanup, that would produce enough entries in subcategories of Category:Cleanup by month to be a good focus for a weekly collaboration.
 * Pearle is now working on doing this. -- Beland 01:30, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
 * An editor could spend a few hours cleaning out the entries on this page that have already been fixed, and cleanup-date tagging the rest to put them Category:Cleanup from September 2004 instead.
 * OK, someone went ahead and did this for September, October, and part of November. -- Beland 21:53, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
 * We are now on June for this conversion. Yay! -- Beland 01:30, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Some of these articles are already in the hands of the Cleanup Taskforce, but not all. The cleanup process could probably be accelerated by making sure that every member of the taskforce has at least one cleanup task on their desk, drawing from the oldest outstanding requests. -- Beland 00:54, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I added all of the articles in Category:Cleanup from September 2004 to Cleanup Taskforce. Not all of them are assigned. Cleaning up Cleanup Taskforce/Members would make that easier. -- Beland 08:08, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Current collaboration template
Would it be possible to create a template for the current collaboration that displays just the name of the current project, as is done with Template:Cotw1, so that pages that don't wish to call the full banner can still display the current topic without having to manually update it every week? It would be most helpful, I think. — Your server has been MC MasterChef  ::  Leave a tip — 09:02, 7 October 2005 (UTC)


 * You can now use: -- Beland 07:38, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Would this qualify as a possible maintenance collaboration?
Looking at Avoid self-references I suddenly got an idea. Why not make a project/collaboration out of creating Category:Self-referencing templates, and then tagging all such templates (disputes, deletions etc) with: That way they would be easier to keep track of and manage. --Sherool 11:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Why would such a thing be useful? -- Beland 07:38, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Proposed procedural change
This collaboration has been a bit neglected lately. I was thinking it might be better to have longer-term collaborations that focus on the most popular and most needy backlogs. We could start with, say, the backlogs longer than 1 year or 1000 entries, and rank them by voting. (I think I have a list of these, which I will post later.) I think we might be able to be more productive if we focus on a specific goal, like eliminating a certain backlog or reducing it to a certain number of articles or a certain date. Because we will be trying to make a larger effort on a long-term goal, I think we can do a little more publicity (like putting announcements on the "goings on" page, the VP, IRC, etc.) which will help us make more progress.

To transition, I'm thinking we can freeze voting on existing nominees, and schedule all of them for the traditional one-week run. This will give these needy pages at least a little publicity, which will hopefully help them get attention while we are busy focusing on a smaller number of backlogs.

Sound good? -- Beland 19:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Progress update
I've updated the progress on the page, however didn't update Wikipedia:Neglected articles because it is from a database dump 6 months old and the articles on there seem to already have had attention. I did update Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year although the list was also updated 6 months ago, I don't know how to get more recent figures from Wikipedia:Requested articles as it's seperated into several sub-pages and not organised by date. —TheJC (Talk • Contribs • Count) 09:09, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Procedural change?
This seems like it has been on wikify for several months. I'm thinking it would be good to get something different. Maybe once a month it could change to the next thing with the highest number. Thoughts? Maurreen 07:16, 16 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Since no on objected, I tried to update the template, but it didn't work. Can anyone help? Maurreen 15:19, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I hate this template now. I had to try and edit this, found out that I had to edit another template, went to edit that, found I had to edit yet another template, found that that redirected to YET ANOTHER template, went to edit that, at which point I finally managed to change the current maintenance collaboration. Its actually Maintenance collaboration of the week/current, which leads to another template, that needs to be edited to change the maintenance collaboration. I've changed it to articles to be merged, since its one of the largest backlogs (besides cleanup, that is), articles requested for over a year has lost its importance, and the three candidates I can think that are suitable are wikify, cleanup and merge backlogs. --Draicone (talk) 12:09, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Transwiki log
I just added a new goal to your page. Enjoy! --Xyzzyplugh 14:58, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Community Portal section
I templated the section of the Community Portal with the summary of the Maintenance Collaboration (is it really still weekly?) so that you can update it easily. Currently it says you guys are still wikifying. You'll need to update it; I suggest a short paragraph on what exactly merging is, how to do it (appropriate links), and why it is important. The page is Community Portal/Maintenance Collaboration—I'd put it at the bottom of the project page. It's a privilege to have a summary on the Community Portal; use it wisely.--HereToHelp 03:00, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion
How about the Maintenance collaboration of the week be Articles lacking sources sometime soon. There are over 20,000 articles tagged in that category and undoubtedly many more that are untagged. This is a major problem for Wikipedia's goals and credibility. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 21:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Another suggestion for COTW
I'd like to propose Category:Category needed. Since recent changes to the way bots send the pages to the category, it has grown extremely rapidly and is now over 20000 articles, despite huge efforts that allowed the full cleanup of the categories for August (~4000 articles) and September (~13500 articles). A COTW would probably be a big hit to the backlog and there is some hope that the backlog is growing artificially fast right now (because of the bots). Once the backlog is cleared (or close to it) I think that the current team of enthusiasts will be able to handle the normal flow. Thanks. Pascal.Tesson 17:47, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

About next week...
I think it's a really bad choice to target Articles requested for more than a year. Not that it wouldn't be nice but there's some definite evidence that some of these articles just cannot be written either because the topic is non-existent or non-notable, because no one has a clue what they are or because the title is too vague to make it clear what the specific request is. Clearing the (now less than a 100) remaining articles is a noble objective but it's also unlikely that a COTW will help. I'm a mathematician and even I would not dare attempt writing any of those 16 articles. Sometimes it's better to have no article than one that is not written by someone competent enough. If this does make it as the COTW I predict that this will only result in a dozen or so new articles and the opportunity to help more maintenance projects which have more needs will be lost. Pascal.Tesson 18:07, 16 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Articles requested for more than a year was the "Maintenance collaboration of the week" some months ago if I remember right. I'm beginning to wonder if this collaboration is abandoned as articles to be merged has been the "collaboration of the week" for more than a month. ~  ONUnicorn (Talk 19:17, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * oh. :-) Pascal.Tesson 20:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, I can only stress that one reason why the articles to be merged has been it for many weeks is because there's still a backlog of over 8,000 articles to be merged (though I wish I knew the exact amount now). Radagast83 08:35, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

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