Wikipedia talk:Reform of WikiProjects

Let's start with Category:WikiProject United Kingdom
This category probably doesn't contain all the British WikiProjects, but it certainly contains most of them. Of these, most are geographical - England (state), Somerset (county), WPUKGeo (general geo), London (city), waterways, etc. Indeed all but one or two, such as WikiProject UK Trams, not only are UK topics but don't have any other likely parents. There's 25 or more projects right there (after deducting 1 or 2 possible exceptions) which could share one template with parameters. Just look at Talk:London - it has England, London, Cities, UKGeo, inside a banner container. That could easily be reduced down to one banner! (e.g. (city=yes would automatically set geo=yes).

These groups aren't going to introduce template sharing voluntarily. They all have vanity, they all love their templates. Some of these groups love their templates more than the articles they're attached to.

We have to:
 * 1) Use a sledgehammer - add these parameters to WikiProject UK, redirect the old ones to it, and get cleaning up talk pages (if resistance is low, bots can then be sent out to replace the excess templates with parameters and remove any no-longer-needed banner containers), or
 * 2) Get some consensus behind some sort of more formal process as discussed above and on attached page, or
 * 3) Accept that the lunatics have control of the asylum and just forget all about it. (But, be warned, people are surely likely to start asking whether these banners serve any purpose at all, and even the good ones could be in danger).

Up to you. --kingboyk (talk) 19:49, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Looks like a sound idea to me. The same thing could possibly/probably be done with WikiProject United States, particularly regarding locations which have changed states over time. And the "sledgehammer" has been used before, by WikiProject Canada among others. It might be a good idea to establish some sort of guidelines for when such could take place, though. John Carter (talk) 19:53, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * WP India is a really excellent example of this concept in practice. --kingboyk (talk) 16:15, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

One other thing about national and regional WikiProjects
I know I'm not alone in this. I really dislike national and regional WikiProjects tagging articles about people merely because the person lived or was born in that country or region. They never get edited by the WikiProject, they just boost numbers.

I would, then, further propose that if national and regional WPs migrate to one banner per country, that at the same time the articles about people within their scope get moved to a WPBiography workgroup e.g. "UK biographical articles" (a joint workgroup between projects in effect, but with the code in WPBiography). This wouldn't increase clutter as WPBiography belongs on all bio talk pages anyway. --kingboyk (talk) 17:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Good idea, although I, who might be responsible for a lot of such, particularly recently regarding Mexico and the Polynesian areas, think what you're probably dealing with is more categorization as "People from X" than because they were specifically born or lived there, and the categorization could maybe be changed as well. Also, such tagging is one of the few ways that most of the related portals can determine which biographies are worth including. I think the reason in many cases is the hope that editors from the area might be able to at least find photos that an outsider might not. I have proposed a variety of Biography task forces before, specific for profession or field of activity, and certainly national groups would work as well. My only question would be that, ultimately, it might entail a very large number of national subprojects, maybe even a few hundred, and that might complicate the banner a lot. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * One per country? So every city, town, village, mountain, river (etc) would fall under one "United States" banner?  Or would the US use particular state projects/banners? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 18:04, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, it might be possible to have a US rivers joint task force with WikiProject Rivers, a mountains task force with WP Mountains, etc. Those might be good ideas, if we can get the banner wizards to get together to work on them. And I just became an admin on the basis of saying I wanted to work on banners. Do I know exactly the wrong time to make such statements or not? Regarding the US, Canada, and some of the other huge countries, there might be need for further specification in some instances, but I think in general the idea is probably a good one. John Carter (talk) 18:10, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * One question which will come to mind to a lot of editors is, if such banners are to be created, how small the constituent units of the banner should be. This is important, as those constituent units should probably be based on the same territory as the extant WikiProject or subproject related to the area. I've started an extremely complicated template at User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers, which might serve as a partial basis for such future templates, and found that difficulty is a very real one. One of the problems is that, in effect, development of such banners might help to inhibit the creation of even smaller work groups in the future, for good or ill. I've foregone inclusion of the various subprojects relevant to the counties of England, for instance. Certainly, categorization could also be a real problem with developing such a system, which should probably also relate at some point to the formal proposal here as well. Anyway, I've still got a lot to do with the sample template, and am off back to it. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
 * One per country, yes, but individual states and cities could have workgroup parameters. I'm not suggesting these groups be told "you're not wanted any more" just "please share an upstream template". --kingboyk (talk) 17:47, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Additional concerns
I believe that there are several articles which inherently relate to a number of related subjects which are unlikely ever to have a "general" WikiProject developed for them. As a result, these separate projects have, to a degree, no choice to adding their separate banners to certain articles of importance to all of them, increasing banner clutter. I'm thinking in particular of topics which might be relevant to all the Abrahamic religions or Vedic religions. I think that these problems could be addressed if there were any way to create a banner which might indicate that those selected articles which are inherently within the scope of these disparate projects could have a specific banner made up for these common interest articles, saying, for instance, "This article related to the development of Abrahamic Religion is within the scope of WikiProject Christianity, WikiProject Islam, and WikiProject Judaism" (opting for alphabetical order here, although Judaism-Christianity-Islam - time order, of Judaism-Islam-Christianity might be possible as well)", with the banner endowed with the option of granting separate assessments for all the relevant main projects. In the instance above, maybe adding WikiProject Bible in some instances might make sense as well. Personally, I think that many/most of the projects in these situations would probably agree to using such a banner on those articles of common interest to all of them. Is there any precedent for the use of such a banner, though? John Carter (talk) 16:25, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Banner parameter question
Is there any way to add a separate parameter to the Biography banner which would not only select for professional subprojects, but maybe also for national subprojects, or, in the English-speaking countries, primary national subdivisions? The end result might be supported by the Swiss science and academia work group, for instance. John Carter (talk) 18:30, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
 * My template coding is rusty - Kirill would be a better person to answer this - but yes I don't see why not.
 * Pseudocode: if swiss=yes and science=yes then category:swiss science and academia work group etc
 * The template already has some code like this iirc. --kingboyk (talk) 17:50, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Single Banner?
I think, given the amount of content a given banner can potentially include, it might be possible, particularly if switches were employed well, for all projects to use the same single banner. That banner could include quick switches listing all the relevant projects designed to show name and selected graphic, so that it might look say, for example, "This article has been rated (X)-Class and "Y"-importance and is supported by the following WikiProjects: (List)." The specific projects listed could be chosen based primarily on whether the article is included in what might be called a "dedicated" category, that is, a category in which all of the contents are expected to within the scope of a given project.

I think there would be several advantages to this sort of system, including making assessmemt in general much easier. There already is one bot which will automatically place a banner on any article contained in one or more specified categories. That kind of bot could be used on all new articles, making it much easier to keep up with new content. If it could also either internally or externally store a copy of the contents of the category the last time it visited, it could even add or remove a given project's banner from an older article as required upon viewing that category again. For those articles which at this point don't fall within one or more such dedicated categories, a "temporary" tag could be added to the article until the categorization is fixed, but probably won't be necessary that often.

As most of us know, we are intending to have a bot ready soon which will be able to somewhat objectively determine the importance of an article. I am aware that are and will continue to be differences among projects regarding quality and importance assessments, and don't think that will change. However, I think those could be resolved by having a project which disagrees with an existing assessment by adding a + or - indicator after their coded name to indicate whether they few a given article as being of higher or lower importance or quality than the so-called "standard" assessment. I would think permitting an article's grade to be changed a maximum of two grades by a given project would be all that should ever be required. I confess to not knowing how hard or easy that might be, however.

There would still be one problem with this, which I admit to also being a problem with the User:John Carter/WikiProject Rivers potential project banner I created. That big problem, which would have to be addressed, would be how to get a single banner to be able to automatically feed into categories which do not all follow the same naming pattern. Actually, that problem might be big enough to ensure that this proposal never takes off. Unfortunately, that same problem also very much stands in the way of the banner I proposed above ever being completely functional.

If this proposal above isn't acceptable, there is one other which occurs to me, which has at least one of the same problems as the one proposed above. That would be the creation of multi-function banners similar to that above. Those projects which have somewhat unique, clear guidelines regarding article content or style could be the ones listed at the top, with the various "supporting" projects listed below. Something of that kind would draw editors' attention to the guidelines better than they often do today. I would think projects which would have banners in such cases would include WikiProject Rivers, whose banner would list in the drop-down the projects for the area in which it can be found, and if possible categorize the article for all such projects. Other similar projects might include Biography, Mountains, Volcanoes, Lakes, Geography, Architecture, and so on.

I posted notes about this proposal on several individual editors' talk pages and on the WikiProject Council's talk page, hoping to get some responses one way or another about these ideas. John Carter (talk) 18:04, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I think it would require a huge amount of code and the template would be a mess. It would be used on so many talk pages that every time it was edited the server would grind to a halt. I prefer the idea of having a few top level templates (bio, UK, USA, etc) and templates for all multi-disciplinary WikiProjects. Sorry I don't have time to answer more fully or think about this further at the moment as I'm working on/testing my bot... yep, putting more banners onto pages :) --kingboyk (talk) 18:10, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Probably right, so that idea can probably be scratched, although the individual projects themselves might be able to be added to a "switch" page and thus not affect the banner itself at all. I hadn't thought of that, actually, silly me. That leaves open the option of trying to create banners like the proposed Rivers banner, which have the problem of differentially named categories. Can anyone think of a way to maybe make a banner be able to fill categories based on different naming styles? If that could be accomplished, the banners for Rivers, Mountains, Lakes, Volcanoes, Cities, Architecture, possibly Biography and Military history, and a few other "main" banners might be all that would be required in most cases, which would also significantly reduce the amount of banner clutter. John Carter (talk) 18:24, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * It would be possible, but it would be bigger than those limits that Kirill Lokshin talked about, and it would be at least 20 times larger than that Africa template. It wouldn't be hard to make a bot to recognise what category the article is in though, but that might lead to mistakes. We could possibly have a banner for each of the core topics that have major portals and have all the projects from that discipline share a banner &mdash; Arts, Biography, Geography, History, Mathematics, Science, Society and Technology (eg. The Geography banner would be shared by WP:USA, WP:UK, WP:AFRICA, WP:USRD etc.)-- Phoenix -  wiki  18:32, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree: it actually sounds like a marvellous idea to me to match the core banners with the subpages of the new WikiProject directory. This would highly improve the general classification of WikiProjects, and create a harmony between the banner system and the directory which might have several benefits.
 * As a sidenote, I am quite in the dark as far as the "standard assessment of article importance" is concerned; actually, this is the first time I have ever heard of it. Where can I learn more about it? Waltham, The Duke of 20:37, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * In all honesty, I don't really understand what the objective behind all this banner-shuffling is here. Consolidated banners have never been an end unto themselves, in my view; rather, they're one aspect to the broader question of consolidated projects.
 * And without project-level consolidation, banner consolidation will create more redundancy, not less. The only reasonable way for a project to abandon its own banner in favor of a consolidated one is if the consolidated one explicitly supports all the infrastructure used by that project.  The typical way to accomplish this would be through turning the project into a task force—ensuring that it has no infrastructure beyond that of the parent project—but other methods are possible.  In any case, however, trying to merge banners without accounting for the underlying infrastructure gains us nothing.
 * What is the purpose of the draft Rivers banner, for example? It certainly doesn't support all the infrastructure of every national and regional project, so it cannot replace their banners.  But what, then, is the sense in adding the national tags to it; the only result will be to change from articles tagged with a Rivers banner and a US banner to articles tagged with a Rivers+US banner and a US banner.  (This aside from the fact that a naive intersection will produce extraneous subsets; I rather doubt "Libyan rivers" will be a topic that attracts any editor interest, for example.)
 * I think that some people are unfortunately losing sight of how things actually work here. Banner consolidation is not a way to revive dead projects, nor a fundamental goal of the WikiProject system as a whole; treating it as such is counterproductive, at best. Kirill 20:57, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I think that banner consolidation is a good thing, but there are schemes to do this already via nesting inside a single template (to reduce template creep), or via WikiProject consolidation where appropriate (as Kirill mentions). I don't think a banner like this Rivers one would work well, because there are an immense no. of intersections possible and it's impossible to code for them all.  However, if there is some way to reduce the proliferation of categories by consolidating them under the ten top-level subject areas, that would be very nice - but I don't know that such a thing is possible.
 * Regarding importance, we do now have test output from a bot, so we can expect some major changes in the coming weeks - if you want to help with this please let me know. Part of that process may be to formalise the WikiProject importance definitions somewhat, though they will always be project-dependent. Walkerma (talk) 04:36, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

The scramble for articles
I'm a editor with WP:BIRD and I've been noticing an increasing trend over the last year or so for editors on the various regional (country, continent, etc) to tag our bird species (and genera and even families) articles with regional tags on the basis that the wretched creature (or taxa) in question is found with its borders. Or, in some cases, has been seen in that country on one or more occasions (what are known in the business as vagrants). While this seems pretty acceptable if the species is a well known and emblematic one, such as the New Zealand Kiwi or the Japanese Crane, in some cases unfortunate and rather unknown species have been lumbered with five country tags or more. In theory species such as the House Sparrow, Barn Owl, Peregrine Falcon and Ruddy Turnstone could end up with hundreds of tags if this trend continues. Unless the species is a country endemic (like the Golden Dove of Fiji) or emblematic (like the Bald Eagle, which actually hasn't even been adopted by the US Wikiproject!) is there any justification for this over-abundance of tags? Why not claim rock, tree, road and sand as well, since they are found in countries too? What can I do if articles get over-tagged? In the case of Little Cormorant I threw all the country tags into one of those shells, leaving out the WP:BIRD one since we actually do most of the maintenance for the article? Is that acceptable? I've also deleted tags when the species in question doesn't actually occur in the country involved; could I prune some of these tags as well? Sabine's Sunbird  talk  03:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * It sounds like you have the right idea. Personally, I'd just remove the tags that aren't really related, but in any case, giving BIRD more presence is appropriate. -- Ned Scott 05:09, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Create A wikiproject
An article type, that is, Ancient History of Western and Northern Europe, Italy, Greece, North Africa and the Mid-East, is not a featured Project on wikiprojects. As these hitory pages are representative of a time period that is of most interest to the community, it doesn't seem as though these histories are co-ordinated, which is why i propose to create a new wikiproject, entitled Ancient History of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East. This should provide an illuminating disscusion, and also it will better organise a set of subjects that provide the greatest degree of insite into where we are coming from, and to also where we are going. If anyone is interested, please contact my talk page. --Tom.mevlie (talk) 12:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree that there is a need to co-ordinate these histories, as they are more or less interconnected, but I don't think that a new WikiProject would be the best way to deal with this. Perhaps a Task Force would be more helpful, under the guidance of the relevant WikiProjects. In any case, the WikiProject Council is the best place to discuss such matters. (By the way, an alternative idea for the title could be "Ancient History of the MTW map area"; much shorter, wouldn't you agree? ;-)). Waltham, The Duke of 21:25, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The comparatively nascent WikiProject History would probably be the extant group whose scope would include such articles, as it is about the only one whose scope is large enough. Part of the problem is going about and tagging all the relevant articles for all the various projects. With only about 50% of all articles tagged at all so far, that can be and is a real problem. But I do think that there probably are enough projects regarding the general subject of history already that there probably isn't a specific need for the creation of a new one. John Carter (talk) 17:06, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject template - needimage syntax
I have looked in a number of pages but have not been able to find any guidelines on template syntax on the topic of requesting images. There are a number WikiProject templates that have some form of needimage=yes field and create entries in categories. However there is some variation in naming convention of the template tag and the name of the resulting category. Is there a standard example anywhere? Traveler100 (talk) 08:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

2016 updates
I wrote some 2016 updates into the page. They're just my own perceptions, but they are unsigned comments, and intended to be editable by anyone (to be descriptive, not advocacy :-). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:23, 9 February 2016 (UTC)