Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Archive 6


 * Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team archive
 * Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team objections archive
 * Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team archive2

Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Work via WikiProjects discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions

Progress - some milestones reached!
It's good to take stock sometimes, especially when real progress has been made. This is where the four subprojects stand at present:
 * CORE TOPICS: The complete worklist has now been assessed! The group has five active editors. It is now actively discussing how to revise the list, and how to expand beyond the original 160 or so.
 * WIKISORT: A test version of the software has been developed and is supposed to be tested soon, though its launch has been subject to delays. The group has 4-5 active members, and it is collaborating with the MediaWiki folks.
 * FAs FIRST: An extensive list of FAs has been created, as well as an FA review page where older FAs are reviewed for quality. So far 12 articles have completed review - six passed (maybe seven now), six were designated to be "of concern." About 6 people are active, with many others contributing with minor comments.
 * WORK VIA WIKIPROJECTS: All of the arts, humanities and business/economics projects have now been contacted by two active people, this runs to around 86 projects in all. Still to be done: Science, technology, hobbies, places. The response rate is typically around 50%, sometimes identifying just a couple of good articles, but sometimes the contact has stimulated major new initiatives by the group such as this (only 3 days ago!).

Other outside initiatives like WP:GA and WP:STABLE are also important new developments that should be very helpful to us. Overall, we are getting through the assessment work, and we can begin thinking about the next stages. Walkerma 04:32, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Roadmap to publication
I believe that now is the time for us to find a consensus on the following: (a) Do we release an "alpha-test" or pilot version (call it 0.5?) of the paper/CD version first? What about a "beta-test" (call it 0.8)? (b) Scope/size of the initial publication, and (c) How do we get there. Please leave your comments in the appropriate section below, and please summarise your "vote" in bold if that seems appropriate. Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Alpha, beta, or 1.0?
The alpha-test or version 0.5 would allow us to pilot the idea and find the major problems involved in publishing Wikipedia in different formats. We may choose to use just a subset of articles so we're not overwhelmed. We can learn a lot from the German releases, but is this enough? The beta-test or version 0.8 would be a larger-scale trial where it would be understood to be a little incomplete or flawed. Or we could go straight to a full version or WP:1.0 release.
 * Comments/Votes
 * I favour doing all three stages, start with the alpha test this summer as a pilot. Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Scope
How many articles? Do we include other things like an atlas for places, a periodic table for chemical elements, etc?

Size of initial publication
As a minimum, we should probably have at least 1000 from a list like this - let's call it "Core Topics Plus." As a maximum, we could follow the German approach and include every article that is not a stub or tagged for cleanup/POV. To simplify things I will put some suggested "ballpark" sizes up:


 * 1000 to 2000 - Levels 1 & 2 only

The core topics group has already assessed level 1, a core of 150 "must have" articles. By publication it should be possible for the Core topics group to have assessed many or all of the 1000, and the FAs first group can probably provide a good list of suitable FAs at or close to the core level.

At this level we go beyond fundamental topics like "chemistry" and only major figures like "Isaac Newton," and we can use nearly all of our ~1000 FAs. We will need to work with subject experts (WikiProjects) to develop a simple hierarchy tree or similar for each major subject area, to list the main topics at this deeper level. We can use most of the articles from the Work via WikiProjects listings, as well as from Good articles. This is a lot of work, though some of the work has already been done, and it ensures that the articles are not concerned with trivia.
 * 10,000 to 20,000 - Levels 1,2,3
 * Support for alpha version: I think this will be do-able by the summer with some hard work, and it will also ensure that our subsequent releases have solid coverage of the major topics in all subjects. Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

This is the approach used successfully by the German Wikipedia folks. If the WikiSort project can give us a list of highly rated articles by the summer, this approach would be very possible, as we should have a large list of "usable articles", possibly as many as 100,000. Since users will tend to give more feedback on important subjects like sodium chloride more than unimportant ones like niobium(V) chloride, the WikiSort will very easily help us to avoid the lower levels of unimportant or trivial topics. Alternatively we could go the German route and just produce a huge publication containing "all non-bad articles", with a disclaimer that some of the articles may be iffy.
 * 100,000 plus - Many levels
 * Support for beta version onwards I think once WikiSort is established it will allow us to publish a large release quickly and easily as the Germans have done, but we can more easily filter out the poor-quality articles. Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Inclusion of non-article content
This covers things like lists and other navigational aids, an atlas etc. I propose we set up a sub-project to look into this and let that team decide what goes in and what gets left out. Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Road map
Here are a couple of ideas mooted so far, these are pretty similar:
 * Gflores
 * 1) List and assess Core Topics
 * 2) *Bring Core topics up to at least A-Class.
 * 3) *Once above complete (or concurrently?), define new subtopics. (this list?)
 * 4) *Once above completed, more?
 * 5) Use featured articles
 * 6) Wikiprojects... purpose? - to find good articles. relation to other core articles?
 * 7) Wikisort... to find good articles from many users' rankings. (theoretical)


 * Walkerma
 * 1) Find suitable articles (Criteria: quality, and importance of topic) in level 1 (core topics), level 2 and at least level 3.
 * 2) Organise the articles in a meaningful way
 * 3) Fill in any important gaps in level 1 and maybe 2 if we can
 * 4) Get the publication issues sorted (Print, CD, DVD, or all three, what software to use with it, etc.)
 * 5) Issue an alpha test (V0.5?), get feedback
 * 6) Issue a beta test (V0.8?), get feedback
 * 7) Issue V1.0

Maurreen 03:28, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Maurreen
 * 1) Work toward getting about 50 core topic articles signed off as ready for release.
 * 2) Re-evaluate to determine next step or steps. Consider publishing or releasing that set, then adding more and publishing again annually.
 * 3) Strongly consider including auxiliary matter (that is, lists and what not).


 * Titoxd
 * 1) Obtain a list of publication topics
 * 2) Contact WikiProjects to determine if any core topics fall under their "jurisdiction" and ask them what is necessary for those articles to be considered A-class
 * 3) Ask WikiProjects to revise the Core Topics list to see if there's something obviously missing
 * 4) Add all featured articles
 * 5) Add all A-class articles
 * 6) Obtain a list of unassessed publication topics and get them independently assessed
 * 7) After assessment, obtain a list of "Most urgent" topics for improvement
 * 8) Send them to WP:AID, with a notice of their high priority for the WP1.0 project
 * 9) Find all Good articles that are assessed and improved since their last assessment and try to improve them to A-class
 * 10) Issue an alpha set of articles for final review
 * 11) Find Wikipedians with expertise in particular areas
 * 12) Try to obtain external peer reviews
 * 13) Find a way to publish articles (e.g. CDs, DVDs, book publisher)
 * 14) Publish the articles as WP 0.5
 * 15) Rinse and repeat for WP 0.8 and WP 1.0


 * YourNameHere

Tools to help get there
A couple of people have putting a "1.0 tag" or perhaps a 1.0 and a 0.5 tag, or a B-Class tag on pages. This would make tracking articles easier, but it would be very hard to stop some vandal from adding silly articles to our list. The advantage of worklists is they avoid this, but they are more work. See discussions such as this. Opinions? Other ideas? Walkerma 17:59, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Tagging pages

This approach is supposed to help us to organise articles in the first 3-4 levels, to help us get a broader view than categories do. Analogy: Cats = road signs, tree = map. I have created a very crude example of this on my test page, which is at the top level in chemistry. If you click on a down arrow you go to the next (more specialised) level. If you click on an up arrow you go to a broader level. If you click @ you get an article, copyright symbol takes you to the category, and = takes you to a list. As an example, have a go navigating your way through this to iron(III) oxide, which is a "substance." Could we make a nicer looking tree? Could a script be written on Meta to allow us to generate meaningful trees from categories, to turn the tree from a static thing (like a list) into a dynamic thing (like a cat, that is edited from the actual page)? There is a crude script available currently to do this, but it doesn't provide the "big picture" I think is needed. Walkerma 19:32, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * "Trees"

The German experience shows the value of having stable versions of articles available close to publication time. How should we utilise Stable versions in WP1.0? Walkerma 19:35, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Stable articles


 * I don't think it's ready yet. Maurreen 03:14, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Proposed initial quality standards

 * At least two people give the article a recent and at least moderate level of review and agree that it meets the standard. Ideally, at least one would be involved with the 1.0 project, at least one would be at least moderately knowledgeable about the subject, and at least one would be a layman about the subject.
 * In no particlular order, articles should:
 * be NPOV,
 * be factually correct,
 * be reasonably clear,
 * be organized adequately,
 * be visually adequate (that is, not ugly),
 * be adequate in scope and proportion,
 * use correct grammar, spelling and punctuation,
 * use style consistent within the article,
 * list at least one appropriate reference, source, further information item, or external link. A link only fulfills this obligation if it connects to a reputable government, professional or education source. Any external links must still be valid.
 * Any easily fixable problems should be fixed.
 * Maurreen 03:25, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Scope/Roadmap
How many articles will WP1.0 have? The German Wikipedia excluded articles containing clean-up and stub tags. I don't think it should be this simple. There are many articles from Britannica 1911 and other similar lists that are stubs. Should those not be included? The German WP1.0 was released with 300,000 articles and Britannica has ~130,000. There are about 1 million article in the English WP. From the looks of it, there will be about 500,000 articles. So what about the last ~500,000 articles? Also, is it possible to find the number of articles with stub, clean-up, and npov tags?

Article validation will play a big role on the size, but I don't see it being implemented anytime soon. There's too many problems and it's such a huge structural change. Wikisort also is a huge change.

More than 200,000 images will be included in the encyclopedia (German WP had 100,000). We'll have to check for copyright and untagged images, obviously. Number of images included in Wikipedia? How many are copyright, PD, etc?

The way I see it turning out is that articles will be systematically chosen to be included in WP1.0, which differs from the German Wikipedia approach. I would like to know if this is the case. The GWP essentially took a snapshot of their entire encyclopedia, uploaded that snapshot to an external server, and reviewed the articles, deleting those that were unacceptable. The most recent release set up a white list of users. I don't think we should go with that, b/c simply choosing the list of users will be of great debate.

Lastly, I would like to hear some estimates on the total number of articles that WP1.0 should have. Throw some numbers around. :)

--Gflores Talk 21:08, 10 February 2006 (UTC)


 * My choices would be:


 * 1) Against following the German Wikipedia example (Anyone who has the wherewhithal for the snapshot method could do so regardless of anything else. I wouldn't oppose that, but they wouldn't need my help.)
 * 2) I'm not entirely clear on "user whitelist" but I'm guess it's not something I or the general community would favor.
 * 3) I am for essentially individual articles generally systematically chosen to be included in a release version.
 * 4) I am flexible about the number. But the number might symbolize other things. I would rather have 100 good articles (lists, whatever) on the most encyclopedic topics than 10,000 articles of varying and indeterminate quality and importance.
 * 5) I think that until we have some number of articles that we have general agreement on that would do the job, much else is premature. Any planning needs to keep in mind that this is a volunteer effort. People come and go and minds change, etc. Maurreen 00:59, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Article assessment
Somewhat related to this is Article assessment, a new weekly project that takes one topic and assesses it under four main criteria. Any contribution, comment or assessment would be welcomed. Thanks, violet/riga (t) 22:12, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Best articles, or most encyclopedic subjects?
Since WP1.0 will be limited by size of distribution media (it isn't paper, but it still will be limited), and will have a maximal size of some n articles (whether or not n is fixed in advance or not)--what is the overall philosophy on selection of articles?

Two possiblities:


 * Find the best n articles, regardless of the notability of the subject, and include those; improving articles as necessary to bring them up to standard.
 * Find the best n subjects, regardless of the (current) quality of the articles, and improve those. (Limiting ourselves to existing articles, and excluding those subjects which are "important" but which are difficult to write well about).

Or some approximation thereof--it would be foolish to think that we can produce a well-ordered ranking of articles.

I'm an inclusionist/constructionist at heart when it comes to the wiki edition of Wikipedia, and am suspicious when notability or importance is advanced for a reason an article shouldn't exist in the wiki edition. For WP1.0, however, stricter editorial standards ought to apply, and notability of topic may become a relevant and useful criterion for exclusion of articles. For example, I can't think of any grounds for Oregon State Route 53, an article I started on a minor highway in Oregon, to be included in WP1.0--even if the article were improved to FA quality. It's simply too minor of a topic. But I believe it definitely belongs in the Wiki edition (otherwise I wouldn't have written it at all), given the wiki edition's lack of size constraint.

Comments? --EngineerScotty 22:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I think article selection will be crucial for credibility. Hope you won't take offence, EngineerScotty, but if we produced a printed encyclopaedia with 50,000 articles on subjects like Oregon State Route 53 we wouldn't find ourselves with a very high reputation.  I think any 1.0 edition should start by deciding on a list of articles to include, then set about making sure they're up to scratch - I'd agree with your second option entirely, except I personally wouldn't agree with the parenthesised restrictions. Worldtraveller 01:21, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No offense, obviously--pages of interest only to us road geeks or other specialized communities are most definitely not appropriate for WP 1.0. My restrictions in the proposal were an intent to simplify the debate, not constrain it completely.  (That said, if you can think of intersting or useful topics which do not have articles on WP, or have poorly-written ones currently, then you know what to do...write the article and/or improve it, so the issue of "does it exist" becomes moot.) --EngineerScotty 01:54, 21 February 2006 (UTC)


 * This is really part of the debate involved above in above, and right now this project is at "a fork in the road" (sorry!) on this very topic.  For myself, I favour basing the content on the most important topics rather than simply on article quality -there may be some "geek" FAs that get omitted for that reason. I think we should cover the first three levels or so of the hierarchy (for example: Europe->UK->Sheffield to use a recent FA) then we might want to "mine" the fourth level (say, towns of 25-100,000) for any A-Class articles. On that basis WP1.0 would include all major cities in the world, and a few other towns that happened to have good articles on them. This organisation could be done in all areas - art, chemistry, etc.  With US roads, as you will have seen in WP1.0 contact with WP:US Roads, this cutoff will probably mean we include all US Interstates (motorways) and US Routes (like British "trunk" roads) but state roads probably won't make it for now (sorry, OR-53!).  As our coverage grows, and we have all US states included, we can probably include these. (Since this is an English language version, I would expect our coverage of roads in anglophone countries to be better).  I would really appreciate others' comments on this general debate - quality, quantity or importance, where and how do we draw the line? Walkerma 18:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

A Simpler Way
I have read some of this page, and am honestly not too interested in helping. However, I think that you could go to print much faster if instead of reviewing all the articles yourselves, all you have to do is leave a message on the talk page, and I am sure that any frequent editor of that page could point you to a stable version of the article. --T-rex 19:34, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I think your suggestions is a good one. However, we are not actually reviewing many articles ourselves beyond the core topics.  The purpose of the "Work via WikiProjects" group is to get subject experts to give us the articles that are both important and good - and that is going very well.  We now have access to lists containing many hundreds of articles which others are assessing - both for their WikiProject and (as a bonus) for us.  Finding a stable version is just one aspect of the project, and will only arise when we know what articles we want to include.  We are hoping that something like WP:STABLE can get up & running by then - maybe you can help them get going with your suggestion?  Or would you like to get it started as a sub-project of WP:1.0? Thanks, Walkerma 20:43, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Scientific peer review
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 18:04, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

New project logo, navigation box and userbox
In order to help raise the profile of the project I have created a little logo (two versions, Image:WP1 0 Icon.png and Image:WP1 0 Icon small.png) and a userbox (Template:User WP1.0). In order to make it easier to keep things coordinated on this project, I have also created a new navigation box (see Template:Wikipedia 1.0 Navigation). I am weak both in art and in technical skill, so please feel free to edit these, come up with a better logo, etc. I just thought that my feeble attempt was better than nothing! I hope you find these tools useful. I plan on introducing another template for "Assessment & Peer Review Projects" in the next few days to help link this project up with FA, GA, PR, AA, SPR, etc., comments are welcome. Walkerma 07:38, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I created what I feel is a better version of the logo. What do you think? -AtionSong 00:30, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Good job and thanks! The WP:1.0 Userbox has now been added to my user page :) Gflores Talk 00:59, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the new logo, AtionSong! I like it! Now I just need to ponder things on your suggestion below for a bit. Walkerma 16:19, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's spiffy. Maurreen 09:00, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

A Proposed Process For Editing
Just a process as we move closer to executing a .5 or 1.0 plan. For an article to get a .5 or 1.0 rating, it should go through the following system:


 * A version of the artical as it is when the process begins is archived, and this is the article edited on. No edits related to this are made to the active article, and nobody can edit the archived version except the 3 selected editors. The archived article then goes through 3 levels of editing:
 * LEVEL 1: At level 1, an editor who is not necessarily an expert on the subject content would read through the article for, and make corrections to:
 * Neutral Point of View
 * Correct Spelling, grammar, usage, and other mechanics.
 * The article is organized in a logical way
 * Proper format
 * LEVEL 2: Once the article has passed through level 1, a level two editor who is an expert on the topic would check the article for:
 * Correct facts
 * Adequate content
 * Adequate linkage to other related articles
 * Logical sequencing and organization
 * Artical is correctly categorized as well as categorized adequately
 * LEVEL 3: Once the article has passed through level 2, a final level 3 editor who is possibly an expert on the topic, or that general topic (e.x. not a specific band, but a perhaps a specific genre, but not just on "music) would check the article for:
 * Correct, appropriate, and/or adequate references cited
 * No copyright violations on images or content
 * Controversial language or facts not related to NPOV
 * Artical is visually appealing

If an article has any problem that is not immediately fixable at any of the levels (e.x. not a neutral point of view), the archived version should be deleted, and the active article should be tagged. The article can then be archived for editing again when the problem is fixed.

Once an artical has been passed through all 3 levels, the archived version should be protected, and tagged as .5 or 1.0 ready. Does this sound like a good idea? -AtionSong 21:57, 13 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I think your plan is not now practical, mainly because of the limited number of people we have working on this. I'm a big believer in simplicity. Maurreen 04:42, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the proposal, AtionSong. I'm also a great believer in simplicity, and I'm also very much aware of our limited (though growing) number of active members, so I have a lot in common with Maurreen on that.  However I do think that the idea will be a very good one to consider as the WP1.0 project matures (I'm thinking here of WP:2.0) and so we should keep it in mind.  Also, I think we can include elements of this idea even in WP1.0.  For example, I notice that Tito proposed a similar "final check by an expert" in his "roadmap" above - we could try to do something like this for at least some articles, particularly if the new scientific peer review initiative gets off the ground.  The Work via WikiProjects people (such as myself) are also in contact with subject experts. Thanks, Walkerma 08:07, 19 March 2006 (UTC)