Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via WikiProjects

This is the main discussion page for the Work via Wikiprojects part of the Wikipedia 1.0 project. Please leave comments below. For technical issues regarding Mathbot, please direct your questions and comments to Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index.

WP1.0 editorial team discussions – Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions

Setting up for MartinBotII
Recently we tested out User:MartinBotII on data from four projects, with a view to pulling out suitable articles for release versions. I've got details of how it would work written up here. Please take a look and give feedback. Walkerma 09:07, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Television
I have just set up an assessment department for our project. It appears the bot has already picked up on it. I think it's about time we joined in, but it's just that there is a lot of fandom in our area, which makes it hard to get the right people together at times :D I was just wondering where all the "up to date" information for these kinds of assessment departments is btw. I'm somewhat lost in all the WP 1.0 pages and can't seem to find a set of clear rules TheDJ (talk • contribs • WikiProject Television) 01:07, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * You may find what you need at Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot. If the guidance is more on how to run an assessment workgroup, take a look at WP:COUNCIL and the "Resources" there.  I will also be writing up a guide to the 1.0 pages once V0,5 comes out. Looking at your project, it looks as if you still need to tag some article talk pages with assessments, so you can see things appear.  When you do that, check for capital/lowercase letters and make sure that the right categories appear at the bottom of the talk page after tagging. Cheers, Walkerma 05:23, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Is there a reason why we have television shows in their current run listed?--Rmky87 15:28, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible task force
Maybe this is a strange idea, but a lot of the articles right now don't fall within the scope of any projects doing assessments. A proposal has been made at WikiProject Council/Proposals regarding setting up a group to specifically engage in assessments, and I've made a sample tempalte at AAA. I'm curious as to whether the rest of you think that this would be a good idea or not, and, if so, exactly what the formal arrangement should be. Should it be a WikiProject, a task force of some other project, or maybe something else? All responses are welcome. Badbilltucker 15:01, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Copied from the above WP:COUNCIL link

 * Description : There is currently a great deal of work being done across projects to assess articles for the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, and that's great, but a great number of articles are not currently tagged by projects which assess for this, and may never be. Therefore, the purpose of this project would be to tag and assess articles not currently covered by an assessing project, for the purposes of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team.

Great idea. Questions come to mind, however. Specifically, would this group basically set up other projects which are not yet doing assessments, and do the assessments for them, or would it have it's own banner and include assessment criteria there? Personally, I would favor the former. If so, I would certainly welcome rolling the proposed Project Support Services project proposal into this one, one way or another. Badbilltucker 18:07, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Interested Wikipedians (please add your name)
 * 1) Blood Red Sandman  Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  17:38, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * 2) Badbilltucker 18:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Comments


 * I had originally planned the latter, however the former seems a better idea. The group could probably get away with also having it's own banner for articles with no project whatsoever, including some quite important ones; Hell comes to mind. Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  18:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, I myself am in the process of doing all the religion related articles, and just haven't gotten to Hell yet. However, I do enthusiastically support the idea. Badbilltucker 18:46, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Yep. In cases where there's an existing project banner to use, it would probably be better to add that than to create some generic one. Kirill Lokshin 19:32, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * However, the project could create it's own banner to use in addition to the other applicable project banners. Badbilltucker 17:04, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * What would be the point? The articles only need to get assessed by a single project in order to enter the system; having an additional banner that's not actually tied to a functional subject-area project doesn't seem useful. Kirill Lokshin 17:07, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I was thinking of something like the existing automatic stub template, possibly with even similar wording. Or maybe a similar addition to existing banners along the same lines as that. Or maybe a small one similar to those used by the WikiProject League of Copyeditors or similar to indicate that the work had been done by the project. I small three or four line ad, as it were. Also, some projects explicitly say only project members can assess articles, and they might want to know why outsiders assessed the articles for them.Badbilltucker 17:20, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * For articles not covered by any project wahtsoever, these would need a seperate banner until a suitible project could be found. I guess part of the scope of this project would be to locate projects for such articles. Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  17:22, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * It would probably work best if we ran User:PockBot or something similar on a given category we know falls within the scope of a given project, and assess those articles which aren't listed as being assessed yet. Badbilltucker 17:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Please do! Certain projects would be very happy to have help with getting untagged articles tagged and/or assesed. :-) Kirill Lokshin 17:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure how mnay people we would need to get this to go, considering it isn't at this point so much a project as a function. There is now a AAA template which could be added to articles to indicate who did the assessment. We'd still need some sort of project page. I've contacted the Version 1.0 Editorial Team regarding this, and am awaiting a response. Badbilltucker 15:17, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

(Unindent) Sorry I took a while to respond to the above request, I got distracted while working on this earlier. (We're also beta testing Version 0.5 :)). This idea would certainly be an excellent addition to the 1.0 project.  We are moving from a manual system of picking articles (as used at Version 0.5) to an automated system (outlined here), to allow us to get much larger collection (V0.5 was only 2000 articles). One ongoing concern with the automated system is that there may be gaps in our selection, if we don't have projects representing that subject area.    For example, we have about 2000 Pennsylvania articles (1000 assessed) to pick from, but no Maryland articles.  This can affect even broader subject areas - we have Dance and Film covered, but many fine arts like painting and sculpture are not (I think!).

I think I would like to combine the efforts of this proposed group with WP:WVWP (Work via WikiProjects), which was very active (indeed WVWP + Oleg set up the bot assessment scheme), but which has lain dormant since the fall because of people's commitments elsewhere (e.g. to Version 0.5). People have also become less interested in contacting WikiProjects now that the projects are coming to us at the rate of about one per day! It is clear that the focus of WVWP should shift from trying to contact all projects, and switch to trying to focus inactive projects. Traditionally (i.e., last year!) many of these functions you describe have fallen to WVWP - we have recorded information manually from projects that are not using the bot, we have helped projects get started with the bot, and sometimes just given general guidance (the role now played by this council). We did a lot of assessments for projects that were new to the concept - Doctor Who, Adelaide, all sorts - just to help them get started. Once they had some examples of assessment of their own articles, they were able afterwards to perform their own assessments and start using the bot. Tagging articles that fell outside the jurisdiction of any active project was less relevant when we only had 50 projects using the bot; it is an excellent idea, and it is a natural evolution for WVWP to work on this.

Therefore I would like to propose that the 1.0 team and the Council collaborate closely on this, with perhaps a joint team. Two ways to do this: I strongly favor the former, mainly because I think we don't want to multiply groups when we may only have a couple of active people in each! Also, despite our inactivity in recent months, there are still occasional edits to our manually listed tables and questions on our talk page. About a year ago we contacted all the WikiProjects ("all" as of Oct '05, much fewer than today) so the community has heard of us. Tables like Philosophy & Religion and (even worse) Humanities) desperately need updating, but there is a lot of valuable information on these tables that should be used. I'd like to find some way of expanding & updating lists like this bot list, which is (in effect) "All the Arts article assessments that come from projects not using the bot".  It can be a lot of work, but in fact a couple of us were able to achieve a great deal when it was a major focus for us.  What do others think?  Walkerma 19:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Rewrite the goals of WVWP to incorporate the new modus operandi, and also bring it under joint jurisdiction of WP:COUNCIL and WP:1.0.  Much of the existing infrastructure can be used and adapted.  (By the way, one of my next projects is to write a site map for the rabbit warren that is Wikipedia 1.0, that may help!).
 * 2) Set up a completely new project under WP:COUNCIL as described above, with a more narrow focus than WVWP, but work closely with WVWP.


 * I think that sounds brilliant, probably by far the best way to do this. I too favour your former idea, much better to run as part of the project then to become a seperate one in our own right; it will probably get off the ground quicker that way, and gain more contributers, too. Also, the fact that the project has already existed for some time, and is well known, will greatly help us. Another deciding factor is that WVWP is on the verge (i.e. may do in a year or two, seems fine for now) of going inactive, which would be a great shame as it was a highly successful Wikipedia group, whereas this would keep the old project going, just under a new direction in adition to it's present duties. Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  20:09, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds great to me. Badbilltucker 16:24, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Great! Should the 3 of us (+ other interested parties, eg Tito or Kirill?) get together on IRC, or have a conference call on Skype, to work out the best way to do this?  Or should we just thrash out our ideas over at Talk:WVWP? I'll try and do some cleanup at WVWP in the next few days, and also work on the site map I mentioned. Walkerma 18:14, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've never used IRC, and don't have Skype, so I would be much more comfortable over at Talk:WVWP. Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  18:54, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

(Copied over from WP:Council by Walkerma 04:36, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Heh, funny. I just uninstalled Skype. :P Unfortunately, I'm having some major connection problems on my house, as my ISP decided to knock down a wire when they went to repair it, so I don't know how long it will take to fix that. Ideally, talk pages were designed for these kinds of things... we should still use them. :) If necessary, I can try connecting from school to IRC, but a set time, during the work week, would need to be scheduled. Otherwise, I like Walkerma's first suggestion better. More groups = divided effort. Tito xd (?!?) 18:21, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Assessment of unassessed articles (New discussion)
There was a suggestion at WP:COUNCIL recently, copied above, that there should be a project which works on article assessment in subject areas where there are no formal WikiProjects. In addition, it could help set up new projects with templates and assessments. Since many of these tasks are already informally done here at WVWP, it made sense to combine the work here. This will mean a big change in what we do here (or haven't been doing, recently!). I will be busy trying to write a site map for 1.0 in the next few days, when finished that may help us see what needs to be done. What do folks think about this? Walkerma 04:36, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
 * This would help us get more articles, so yes, it is a good idea. However, we should get another project to do it because doing it ourselves would take too long. Eyu100(t 14:23, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Why can't it be a seperate task force within the larger project? Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  07:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, we could certainly do that - though at the moment there are only a handful of active people here (I sense that in Eyu100's comment). Having said that, if we start some serious & productive activity, people will join us to help - that is the way Wikipedia works.  Walkerma 15:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes - particularly, as I mentioned in the original discusion, above, because this project is already well established, so the task force would quickly gain a lot of support even by Wikipedia standards. Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  19:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, how should we start this? In other words, how can we best identify articles that are (a) not assessed yet and (b) worth spending time on? Many projects have articles related to their fields that are not even tagged simply because they are relatively obscure topics. I don't want us to waste time on those because they should get covered eventually by the relevant project, and anyway they're not that important. We need to find the important articles that haven't been assessed yet. I'd like to suggest we start with Vital articles, this is a list of the top 1000 or so, and make sure these have all been assessed. Any one of these 1000 could be major enough to be its own WikiProject, so if we find any major gaps we could try and muster up interest in starting one. We might do the same with WP:CORE and WP:CORESUP, which are other lists of important articles (about 400 from the two, some of which overlap with VA) - these should all have been assessed, but the assessments may be out of date, and we may identify gaps there too. Another fruitful source of articles could be this project - we could go through the manually-generated tables and add bot-readable tags to them.
 * Poke David onto helping us out somehow. He says he is "Envious of de.wp"... Tito xd (?!?) 18:22, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments (further above) & suggestion Tito. I've tried pestering David in the past, since he was one of the early active people at 1.0, he ignored all of my posts for some reason - but I'll contact him again. Interesting that he links to the 1.0 page. Although I have always admired what they have achieved at de, I'm getting less envious of de every day - we have an open source GPL offline reader (de's is proprietary), and we have a quarter million assessed articles (de has none!). I'm hopeful that once the Version 0.5 CD comes out (we're already planning the publicity) we will get some new blood in the 1.0 projects - and maybe others like David will get involved again. As for telephone, Skype & IRC, I like these sorts of things for brainstorming - everyone is there together, and you can be open & frank about the situation knowing that stupid things you say are not on the Web (unlike here). Still, we can certainly bounce ideas round here a lot as well.

Do others have other ideas on how to proceed? I'd like us to frame a strategy before I spend a lot of time rewriting the WVWP project description. Walkerma 18:46, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * WP:VA isn't a bad place to start. Another possibility might be to have PockBot run on some key categories.
 * One important thing to do there is to check whether the untagged articles already have an associated WikiProject that isn't doing assessments yet; there are still quite a large number of such, and prodding them into doing their own assessment will get a lot more articles into the system than just tagging a few in their scope for them will. Kirill Lokshin 18:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I would agree, the best place to start would be those lists, followed by manually identifying some important categories and running Pockbot through them (if indeed it can be modified to do so, but even I, with no knowledge of scripts at all, am reasonably confident it can be done easily). Blood Red Sandman Open Up Your Heart  -  Receive My EviLove  19:50, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, I'm doing a sweep through all of the subprojects of WP:1.0, creating templates to help people find all of the corners of the project! Having done 0.5, my top priority, I reckoned this should be next - please see my effort at the top of the project page.  One page is new, VA tagging, and it is designed for doing the task we agreed upon - checking articles from the WP:VA list.  At 0.5, we found this low-tech, simple system worked very well, using and to mark articles as being checked.  Please feel free to make a start, and to adapt it as you see fit.  Meanwhile I will (a) try to rustle up some help - once a few articles have been checked (to show people how it's done) - and (b) I'll get rewriting the main WVWP page to reflect our new "mission."  Others are of course welcome to help with these tasks as well! Walkerma 04:52, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I noticed the number of banners without assessments in several of the saints articles, and came here. I think a big part of the problem with getting articles tagged with the relevant banners is the fact that many of the categories are, well, a mess. Articles that at best marginally relate to a category are included, central articles to the category often excluded. If we could fix up categorization, that might make things significantly easier. Does anyone know if anyone is actually doing that? John Carter 20:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know of a specific project to do this, but I know in chemistry the chemistry wikiproject tends to clean up categories and discuss changes. Some things are easier to categorise than others, though.  I'd try raising the issue at WP:Saints and/or WP:Catholicism first. By all means ask again for help here if you get nowhere.
 * Regarding the rewrite of this page and the start of VA tagging, I will start on that once Version 0.5 is completed - hopefully very soon. I'm wading through pages and pages of script output at the moment, cleaning up articles! Walkerma 04:53, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * A few of us recently put together a WPBiograply assessment drive. At about the same time, Outriggr created a beta-status script that permits assessing for different projects from the article page. We just started using it, but have found it very effective. Outriggr might be able to modify the script to meet your needs. -- Jreferee 07:04, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info. Actually, I already used it for some VA tagging.  It really makes things much faster, doesn't it!  When I get time to update the main WVWP page, I will recommend we use this tool.  He's actually upgraded it to allow you to edit assessments without opening the talk page, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet. Walkerma 05:02, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject History of Science
I'd like to participate in this. I've copied as much of the relevant stuff as I could to WikiProject History of Science/Assessment and the related pages (based on WikiProject Science Fiction/Assessment), and copied in the assessment code to the HistSci. Please let me know what else I should do.--ragesoss 21:04, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Looks like you have everything set up perfectly! You should see MathBot pick it up during the next 24 hours, and things should settle down after 48 hours or so.  You can run MathBot manually through the project if you're really impatient.  Thanks for using the bot. BTW, speaking personally as a chemist we at WP:CHEMISTRY should probably collaborate with you on getting Antoine Lavoisier up to FA status some time! Cheers,  Walkerma 05:18, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Style of this page
The Work via Wikiprojects page (whose talk page this is) looks kind of messed up for the moment I think, with that large Work via Wikiprojects pages on top, and now with a blown up Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Statistics (the latter is my fault). It would be nice if the page were made more readable. I tried to reorganize things myself but I could not make it look good (and I don't know what's important and what should be on top). Anybody willing to work on this? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:33, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I will move the navigation template to the bottom, if you think that looks better. For a long time people have complained that they couldn't find their way around the maze of 1.0 pages.  I am slowly writing templates for all the 1.0 projects, as a way of dealing with that, and the WVWP template is "no. 2 in a series". I put it at the top so that people would be aware that it's now available, but perhaps the time to advertise it is over.  Another thing, I'm going to completely rewrite the description of the project (see "New direction..." above), so things on the page will change a lot soon anyway.  The current text is out of date. As for the statistics page being "your fault", I really appreciate that information, the project is gearing up to automate the use of it.  Thanks, Walkerma 19:58, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I think the the navigation template looks better at the bottom. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Martinbot?
Is Martinbot ready to do a full test run? Eyu100(t 00:01, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I just sent Martin a message, then realised that only yesterday he left an update with "garhh" in the edit summary. He's getting really annoyed with BT! Walkerma 22:47, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Motorsport
Hi, I've just ran your bot three times and hundreds of articles seem to be missing. As you can already tell, there are several of child projects (Formula One, A1 GP etc.). Are the child projects included in the motorsport bot. The project members go round editing all parts of motorsport. Can you please try and get the children projects on the same bot as Motorsport, please. Many thanks. Can you reply on my talkpage, it's easier for me to get to. Davnel03 19:20, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Removing the importance part from our projects assessments
The importance rating has cause enough controversy and is not being used to its full potential in the Aircraft project. What would be the easiest way of removing this part from our assessment profile. Can we just delete the related categories and remove the code from the project banner? What will the bot do after this is done? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 01:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I think if you just delete the importance part of the template, this will remove all of the importance assessments at a stroke. The table should (I think!) start to show all of these as unassessed for importance.  If you ever decide to revisit this (because we are starting to use importance for article selection at WP:1.0), you can go back into the history of the main worklist to dig out the information.  One compromise many projects use is to agree (by discussion) on a small set - perhaps 5-10 in a project like yours - of Top-Priority articles, and only tag these - that is usually less controversial than the levels below Top. Walkerma 01:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible replacement of Kofi Annan on VA list?
Considering his term has now expired, I was wondering if it might make sense to replace Annan on the VA list with Ban Ki-moon, his successor? John Carter 21:29, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes this would be fine, I think, though it should be changed at WP:VA as well (if not yet done - I know the French have made that update to their list). The VA tagging list is in fact a "snapshot" of the actual WP:VA list from about a month ago, since we can't work with a moving target.  Walkerma 01:58, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

VA tagging
I've started going through some of the articles on the VA tagging list to ensure that the relevant projects have their banners on the talk pages. I would add the WVWP tag someone mentioned on the main page here, but I don't know what it is. Can anyone help me in this regard? Thanx. John Carter 19:22, 1 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I think we may need to create a template. I'd suggest that (for now) we just write a note next to the article name on the VA tagging page.  We need to discuss exactly what we plan to use for a template, how it's used, etc. Walkerma 02:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * If we were to create a template, I have seen various 0.5 and 2006 CD article templates on several of these pages already. Might it be possible to create one standard Version 1.0 Editorial Team banner which might be able to function for the entire group? Maybe add criteria for which release if any the article is being considered for, etc. It might be easier to just update an existing template than having to keep adding a new one for every new release. John Carter 16:01, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That's a very good idea. We'll need to get various people to agree with that.  This will be much easier to do once the CDs are released - both are due to come out in the same week (the last week of March).  I'd say we should plan and write something now, but hold off implementing it until after the CDs are out.  Thanks, Walkerma 16:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I would encourage people to use this javascript tool when looking for assessments. I haven't tried the latest "killer app" version, but even the basic version worked very nicely, and saved a lot of time when looking at what had been assessed. Walkerma 05:07, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

VA Universities
I notice only Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University are included on the VA list. This seems to me slightly US-centric. Shouldn't at least Sorbonne, University of Cambridge and University of Oxford be included as well? John Carter 18:44, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Dungeons & Dragons
I think the bot may be getting confused by the ampersand in the quality category. It should be depositing the stats in Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/D%26D_articles_by_quality_statistics, but instead they're showing up under Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/D. The D&D articles by quality and D&D articles by quality log links aren't showing on the main page here either. How might they be fixed? Would changing the category names from the ampersand to the word "and" work? That'd be an easy fix, if so. Please to advise, thank you very much. :) --Ebyabe 20:29, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the amphersand is most likely the problem - if I recall correctly, the bot has had problems in the past with unusual characters in project names. If that doesn't solve the problem, the best place to raise the issue is here. Cheers, Walkerma 03:55, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Template:WP1.0 Arts
The template isn't working properly on certain articles - specifically the one on Talk:Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'd fix it but I'm not sure how to and don't want to screw up a bunch of articles. Koweja 18:06, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for reporting this. I'm not able to fix it, I'll see if we can find someone who can. Walkerma 03:52, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Assessing projects
I have just compiled a list of all the nominal Projects out there, and will be forwarding a list of those engaged in assessment not already listed here as doing so comparatively shortly. One question, though. At least a few projects place all their articles in a single "unassessed" class. I'm guessing you'll want to have those Projects separated out from the others? John Carter 14:22, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * This is very helpful, thank you for working on it. Are these just the active projects? The list should be compared against those in the sub-directories of WikiProject Council/Directory.  I'm thinking that perhaps we should highlight the non-assessing projects in 'bold font as a simple way to highlight them.  I think what you're doing is definitely the direction we need to be going in.


 * Could we have an IRC meeting about how to proceed with this project? Several people are interested in helping, we just need to get everyone working in the same direction.  There are also some very knowledgable people and/or bots we could bring in to help us.  Thanks, Walkerma 16:01, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * It's a list of all the projects doing assessments, although there don't yet seem to be any inactive projects that do assessments. I have no objections to the IRC meeting, although I admit I have myself never used it so I'm not really sure how to proceed. John Carter 19:24, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, this is the master list for projects using assessments, any list we used should be based on that. It's updated by bot so it's always within a day or so of being perfect.  More later... Walkerma 21:28, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I only learnt about IRC last summer, take a look at this message which helped me get started using Chatzilla. I simply downloaded it, clicked a couple of times, and found myself online.  You see a list of the people who are logged in, and you type text into a box - when you hit enter it appears in everyone's screen as part of the discussion.  IRC is widely used when Wikipedians want to have a virtual meeting.  I'll give the IRC channel in the description below.  I've already contacted a few people who may be interested. Walkerma 04:32, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

IRC meeting
I'd like to propose we have an IRC meeting soon to plan a strategy for this project for the next year or so, held at #wikipedia-1.0. Please read this discussion to see what we're planning. I will be away in Chicago (& busy during daytime Chicago time) from 24th-29th March. What dates & times (specify time zone) would be good for people who are interested? Weekends work well for me, during evenings UTC. Walkerma 04:39, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Despite my concerns on your talk page, this could turn out OK for me to join in. Afternoons UTC are generally when I can get online, and Friday and Saturday evenings are very good aswell (also UTC). Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 07:42, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Weekend evenings are good for me as well this week. When and at what time? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 06:52, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, how about this Sat evening UTC (afternoon in the US) - perhaps 1900 UTC? Walkerma 13:50, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * On second thoughts, we probably need some time for people to download and set up Chatzilla (or whatever). Would Sunday evening 1900 UTC (afternoon in the US) work OK? Walkerma 19:03, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Should be able to be there at that time. John Carter 19:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Assuming I can set it up OK, I should be able to make it. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 19:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The time works for me. MahangaTalk to me 02:18, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I should say that it apears I will no longer be able to make it - my computer is getting nothing but 404 errors from Freenode, and I don't think it's a problem their end, as previous attempts have had a similar result. My computer just doesn't like it. :-(. All I can do is ask that someone drop a note on my talk page saying what was decided; I'll just have to go along with it. Sorry, wish I could be there, Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:23, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
 * You can try http://www.ircatwork.com if your IRC client acts up. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 18:36, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That works fine. Thanks! Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 18:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Time: Sunday evening 1900 UTC (2000h CET, or 3pm US Eastern Daylight Savings Time).


 * Proposed agenda items
 * After VAs and core topics (incl. the supplement), then what?
 * Ways to find the subject areas that currently have poor coverage by projects.
 * How best to organize the work.
 * MartinBotII and Version 0.5 update
 * (please add more as needed)

WikiProject Environment template
I'm trying to figure out how to add class and importance ratings on the environment template. I did some fiddling around and I think I got it working. How can I get the importance rating to show in the template, like cvgproj? I copied the importance code from album, which doesn't show it. Could someone check it out for me. Thanks. MahangaTalk to me 15:21, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm hopeless at these fancy templates, but I know that often they don't show the importance unless the parameter is entered. Make sure you look at an example that has importance=some valid parameter. If that doesn't work, let's hope Kirill Loshkin, Kingboyk or other template expert can  help. Walkerma 02:28, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
 * The easiest thing would probably be to copy the relevant code from a template that does show them; but, really, the code is the same as the code that shows the class, with just a different parameter being used and different text displayed.
 * (If you can't get it working by Sunday evening, I may be able to fix it for you; but I doubt I'll have the chance to look at it until then.) Kirill Lokshin 15:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Everyday life / Sports
Can someone who knows what they are doing start the "Everyday life" page and its subsections (incl. sports) please? I have content to add, but there's not place for it yet, and I just wandered in. I'm often WP:BOLD but not when I don't know the templates and formatting yet. &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 23:24, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I'll try and get something put up tomorrow night. Which projects are you reporting for, so I can make sure I cover those? Thanks, Walkerma 01:51, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Just WikiProject Cue sports and its "child" WikiProject Snooker for now. I'm sure once the section is open others will wander in. &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 02:45, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I haven't forgotten this, but it's almost 2am and I have to work tomorrow! Maybe tomorrow night? Walkerma 05:49, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * No worries. Pushing 2am myself, and it's not like I need to spawn a flurry of beer-fuelled activity in the wee-hours.  No big hurry.  If a week passes I'll ping you about it.  :-)  &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 07:44, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Shiny new template
As requested on the IRC meeting, here we have. This template will [hopefully] supercede all of the Editorial Team's banners, including v0.5, v0.7, v1.0, WPCD, and templates for Vital articles and core topics.

Currently, it is still in beta stage; while I think I did a lot of conditional statements right (see for the template voodoo), it is still missing several things. I did not add those things as I wanted to make sure they were going to be used beforehand.

The template can replace all of the v0.5 templates; the built-in functionality should do it transparently. However, I'd like someone to double-check the category structure I put in the template, as I'm not sure whether I missed something or not.

Some other issues:
 * 1) It doesn't work with small=yes yet, mostly because I don't know how to do so :P;
 * 2) I would love to have something similar to the MILHIST "hide" function, to hide all the tags by default;
 * 3) I haven't put the class parameter in for VAs, CORE or CORESUP, mostly because I'm waiting for the go-ahead signal from those projects;
 * 4) I did not put importance in, as agreed to;
 * 5) I did not put the projects list parameter, because I wasn't sure how WP:1.0 would like to handle and display that info.

Please also review the wording, and feel free to take the template out for a spin. The usage is as follows:

Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 05:49, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Just as a note, you should work with User:Kirill Lokshin who is the drive behind ArticleHistory and WikiProjectBanners. I think that would benefit all. Too many templates are doing too many things already, and Kirill seems to know what he's doing when it comes to talkpage banners. --TheDJ (talk • contribs • WikiProject Television) 17:22, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Kirill already checked it, and added the collapsing feature, so that is done. Small=yes would be nice, but that I don't know how to do... however, checking the wording, checking the links within the template, and checking the category structure (meaning, did I forget to add an important category?) are still left to do. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 17:26, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I changed the wording "is part of ... (article list)" to "is one of the (article list)" in two locations on the template, as I think the latter flows more easily. I might be wrong though. John Carter 17:38, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Installed it at Talk:Albinism. However, I'm a little concerned that the template is pretty much undocumented.  There's nothing explaining what the orphan, VA, core and coresup parameters are for, and even other stuff is only documented in the templates being replaced.  Many users would also ask what is the different between pass and held.  Etc. &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 20:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Also installed it at Talk:New Delhi and discovered that "|v0.5=fail" doesn't seem to do anything. &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 20:57, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the template, and for the examples we can look at. I notice that the WPCD categories are not showing up at all- shouldn't we see those?  Also, on Albinism I see that 1.0 categories are being generated, but we don't have a 1.0 release yet, so these are all redlinked.  Could you remove the V1.0 references until we reach that point? As for v0.5=fail not doing anything, does it need to?  I don't know that we want to advertise too loudly the fact that an article failed V0.5 - unless there is a reason we need to? Thanks, Walkerma 04:40, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Re: 0.5: I'm not sure hiding failure is good. Highlighting it is fairly likely to generated fix-it editing action, esp. since it implies that unless fixed it will also fail 0.7 and 1.0.  Cf. failed GA and failed FA templates.  Maybe its just me, but it seems that they generate a certain amount of activity. &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 05:03, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, the template is not documented yet, mostly because I haven't gotten around to it yet. I will do that, once I have the time, or until somebody beats me to filling out Template:WP1.0/doc. As for the 1.0 cats - I thought I had removed them earlier today? Unless somebody changed the template while I wasn't looking, those should be gone. I'll have a look there. As for v0.5=fail, v0.7=fail, et al, what we did originally was to just remove the 0.5 nom template, so I just kept using that behavior on the new template. As for WPCD - that is exactly the kind of thing I asked about when talking about checking the category tree - it is too complex, and I was bound to miss something. I'll see what I can do. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 04:56, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, I've commented out the 1.0 categories, and readded Category:Wikipedia CD Selection. In the process, I found Category:Wikipedia Release Version. What is that one for? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 05:05, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I'm not really sure we will need the Release Version template at all; I think your new template covers the same ground and more. We may need to delete it if it is not in use. Thanks, Walkerma 05:47, 21 March 2007 (UTC)


 * All right, I'm now fairly confident that the thing works the way it is supposed to be. The only that hasn't been enabled is the Orphans listing, but that is extremely simple to do. Here's the templates and categories that can be safely deprecated:
 * v0.5
 * v0.7
 * core topic
 * v1.0
 * releaseversion
 * WPCD
 * Category:Wikipedia Release Version
 * Note that this category will be deprecated, as individual release categories such as Category:Wikipedia Version 0.5 and Category:Wikipedia Version 0.7 will replace it if the parameters are filled properly. Also, I've gone ahead and created the Vital articles by quality (for WP:VA) and Core topic supplement articles by quality (for WP:CORESUP), so we can track those as well. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 05:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

"Contact with Contact with" error
I looked in one of the already-established topical sections on the page to which this talk page is attached, and all of the tables in it have headings like "Contact with Contact with WP Rational Skepticism". &mdash; SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 21:02, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Assessing projects
Please see here for a list of all the projects currently engaged in assessments. I would try to add them to the lists here, but find that the fact that they aren't the same as the layout of the project Directory makes it harder for me to figure out where they go. The projects in alphabetical order are the ones that aren't yet included one the lists of projects doing assessments, the ones by page on the bottom are those which are already included in the contact pages. Is there any way to maybe contact the WikiProject Council to perhaps develop a uniform breakdown of these projects? John Carter 19:27, 27 March 2007 (UTC)


 * This might not be quite as simple as you think. I regularly do assessments of articles within the scope of WP:CUE, but I use WP:SPORTS and/or WP:BIO assessments, because WP:CUE is too small to support its own assessment dept.  I'm actually working (slowly) on a WPP "mega-template" that could kind of revolutionize the WPP assessment concept: it would be a single talk page header, for WP:CUE (or whatever project, in the generic version) that handled assessment parameters from other, more general projects (and with special stuff for WP:BIO, since it is just, well, different due to WP:BLP).  I think only a tiny handful of the WP:SPORTS "child" projects have assessment depts., and this is true of many other overarching WPPs' "children", so this might be emminently useful when I'm done with it.  However (to get back to the point) it could complicate the entire concept of "WikiProjects doing assessments", depending upon what the goals of such a catalogue are.  If the goal is to ID WPPs that have assessment departments, there's no effect at all, but if it is to ID WPPs that are bothering to get into the assessment process, you'd have a very different story.  &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 00:21, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I can't speak for anyone else, but for me the purpose of having the list is to
 * (1) know whose banner can be reasonably placed on an article that hasn't yet been assessed to allow assessment of the article, and
 * (2) to know how far along the assessment unit is. I acknowledge that some of the smaller projects might not have sufficient content to set up their own assessment departments, but that's not the point at least to me. I do hope that someone else with more experience adds comments for the Editorial Team as a whole, though.
 * John Carter 15:29, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll see if we can get WP:COUNCIL to use the same organisation scheme as we do, though that may be difficult. It would certainly help to harmonise things, even WP:GA uses the same set of categories as WP1.0. I'm very busy at the moment - tonight was pretty much a one-off - but I'll try to work on this some more when I can.  At least I got the main WVWP page done.... (please edit as you see fit). Walkerma 07:48, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Let us know here when you do that. I for one will argue for it at COUNCIL.  The more uniform we make this stuff the better it will work. &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 21:40, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The "child projects" like WP:CUE don't need and I would argue shouldn't have their own assessment departments and templates. Share the infrastructure, it's much better that way - less talk page clutter, less pages to maintain, more hands on deck. I think the runaway success of WP:WPBIO and WPBiography proves this. --kingboyk 12:50, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I believe this is what I'm getting at. I'm actually working on a new Cue sports project that will be able to use WP:SPORTS assessments to prevent the tagging of WP:CUE-scope article's talk pages with both projects' tags.  &mdash;  SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;contrib&#93; ツ 21:40, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Martinbot, yet again
I have been inactive in this project for a while. I am coming back to work on the release version, but what happened to Martinbot? The assessments were originally going to start in January, but nothing has happened. Has British Telecom fixed his internet connection yet? Also, we might want to consider letting projects rate each other after we do a full-scale test with the multiplication scale and linkranking. Eyu100(t 16:02, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Welcome back Eyu100! Martin was inactive for a very long time because of the BT connection, or lack thereof. We chatted on the phone last month.  He now has a Toolserver account and is setting things up on there.  You can see a lot of the developments during your absence here and here.  He had told me he would be testing it last weekend, but I haven't heard anything as yet - he mentioned that he needs the Toolserver to be upgraded, supposedly happening soon.  I think it's also a very complicated piece of code to write, so it may take him a few weeks.  He plans to do testing over the next couple of months, then once some important exams are over in June he should be able to devote a lot of time to it. In the meantime we need to keep reviewing and nominating manually, I think.  Walkerma 20:28, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Where are the results? Eyu100(t 03:26, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh. Eyu100(t 15:33, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the results will be posted here, but he had a bug in table generation (I think) which meant he couldn't display the test results for us to see. The main progress has been in the speed with which he can get through the data - seconds instead of hours. Walkerma 16:35, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Or "hours rather than seconds" maybe? --kingboyk 16:41, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * If you're making a dig at the progress, that's limited by Martin's time! I'm referring to his comment "I was able to do a dummy run on all FA and B class medicine articles in less than 5 seconds!" - with the old MartinBotII system this would have taken an hour or so. Walkerma 17:49, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I put up the centralised project ratings idea back up on the Martinbot discussion page (not his talk page). Eyu100(t 14:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Wasn't making a dig at all. Thanks for clearing that up! --kingboyk 14:52, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

MartinP has let me know that he has been unable to do the tests because the toolserver has kept crashing. That was giving headaches for WP 1.0 Bot and Oleg too, that's why Oleg switched back to his own server. He's been told that the problems should be fixed this week, so let's hope! Once things there are fixed, he's all ready to go. Walkerma 14:47, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Oriental Orthodoxy...
Is I believe set up for the bot. With any luck, the statistics will appear soon. John Carter 15:15, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Still waiting for results from the bot. Not entirely sure what's happening here, but the project started assessments around the first of the month. I would have thought the bot might have gotten to this project by now. John Carter 20:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You forgot to add the Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments. It's needed for the bot to detect it, which it now has. :) MahangaTalk 22:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I feel truly stupid for that mistake. Thanks for the pointer. :) John Carter 22:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Musical Instruments...
has been set up for both quality and importance (with a LOT of willing plagarism from the WPMILHIST project and Kirill). Which raises a few questions: we are not using the standard "class=" in the template, we are using a "quality=" option. Will this wreak havoc on the toolserver (our test says it's OK, but you never know....)?

We also have some additional levels of both quality and importance. Will the bot pick up on those, or do we have to stick with the pre-set levels?

Speaking of the bot, we (hopefully soon) will be adding more attributes to our project template. Will additional tags give the bot gastritis?

We're looking forward to getting our first automated assessment! - NDCompuGeek 08:08, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The bot doesn't care about tags at all, actually; I'm pretty sure it doesn't even know they exist. What it actually looks for are the rendered categories (e.g. Category:A-Class musical instruments articles) on the talk page; how those are produced is completely up to you.


 * It is constrained to the common levels, however; one approach here may be to display your own rating in the template, but round it to the closest standard one when generating the category. Kirill Lokshin 11:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Kirill is correct, but I have to ask why you wouldn't use the generic terms? Other bots and scripts read the parameters, not the categories. --kingboyk 11:37, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

←With all the different layers of musical instruments to consider, instead of having task forces for each country's (or continent's) musical instruments, and with all the different genres to consider with specialized instrumentation (a classical guitar is appreciably different from a country guitar), we felt it would just be easier on the project to layer this information in with the importance scheme - except we needed another layer or two. That's why we started the "normal" class, and are actually using the "no" class as a layer also (as opposed to "unassessed"). I really hope, Steve, that it won't cause too much confusion for the 'udder' bots (even if the tags are remooo-veable) (sorry, couldn't resist the pun! I guess I'm just in a bovine moooood - I've been listening to Spike Jones and the City Slickers lately :-))~...) ....

WikiProject Gender Studies
has been engaged in assessment for some time, but has yet to show any statistics. I have no idea why. John Carter 20:27, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's deja vu all over again. ;) "You forgot to add the Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments. It's needed for the bot to detect it, which it now has. :) MahangaTalk 22:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC)" MahangaTalk 07:30, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, in this case it wasn't my creation, so I only tried to cobble together what already existed. Not a good excuse, I know, but people who have a habit of making the same mistake over and over and over again (like, well, me), have real trouble admitting it. John Carter 15:14, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Kudos to you for taking the initiative to get it sorted! Walkerma 02:54, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

SERIOUS TERRIBLE QUESTION :S
How can i add such a table to the WikiProject i work on ? Ammar (Talk - Don't Talk) 09:29, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Create the page Version 1.0 Editorial Team/(fill in the blank) articles by quality statistics and transclude it to wherever you wish. To have the chart populated, however, you would have to create the assessment categories to be displayed on the chart. If you would like to contact me personally regarding the specifics of which project you are referring to, I could probably help set up the assessments material. John Carter 14:03, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It'd help if you told us what project you're working on. MahangaTalk 15:58, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

VA tagging (again)
The VA articles have now all been tagged. Not all of them have directly obvious associated projects, but I have proposed projects when it seemed to me that there was sufficient volume of content to do so. I guess this leaves us somewhat up in the air. If I might propose a possibility, probably the single largest project out there, WikiProject Biography, still has a staggering number of articles unassessed. Other large projects, probably including the likes of Military history, probably have similar problems. If we were going to do any sort of other assessments, I would think that those two projects would probably be the best place to start for the possibility of reducing the backlog of unassessed/tagged articles. Thoughts? John Carter 00:24, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
 * The biography project is ten times the size of the Milhist project, and has one hundred times the backlog. Other than the mega-large Biography project, the projects with the most unassessed articles are those that don't have a large, active membership, that are set up for assessing but haven't done any. (Edit: WP:ALBUM and WP:SONG are large projects that could stand (a lot of) help.) Nifboy 01:06, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your work on this, John, we've now covered the top 1000 or so. I'd like to use the VA tagging page now for review as part of the Version 0.7 project (all VAs are were automatically nominated).  Does anyone mind if I use that page for V0.7 now? Thanks, Walkerma 02:21, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure a simple bot could list the wikiprojects ordered by the number of unassessed articles. I did a quick manual check and this is what I found. Did I miss any big wikiprojects? Number unassessed (in thousands)
 * 93,000 - biography
 * 1) 31 - album
 * 2) 14 - france
 * 3) 13 - india
 * 4) 10 - songs
 * 5) 8 - california
 * 6) 8 - australia
 * 7) 7 - books
 * 8) 5 - television
 * 9) 5 - schools

Those projects sum up to 194 thousand unassessed articles. There are roughly 300K WikiProject articles unassessed, so there still remain about 106K in the remaining wikiprojects, most of which contain less than 5K unassessed articles. Can someone double check this for me? MahangaTalk 05:00, 18 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm also well aware that WP:Chemistry has around 23,000 articles (most untagged), of which perhaps 18,000 are not covered by WP:Chemicals. With only 1000 assessed, that leaves about 17k to be done.  Being a chemist and project member, I want to focus my energy on that 17k. I suspect there may be some other broad subjects like chemistry with similar issues. Walkerma 20:02, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Unassessed-Class articles by project
Is there any way to get an automatically created list of the number of unassessed articles the various projects have made? Given the number of projects engaged in assessments, and the changes which are no doubt made every day, it's probably the only way to know which projects are in most and least need of help. John Carter 16:37, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * This is an excellent idea. Can User:PockBot do this, perhaps trawling through Category:Unassessed-Class_articles?  I'm not sure.  The alternative would just be to go clicking through A-Z till we found one that needed a lot of work - I suspect we'd probably get no further than WP:Adelaide... I'll try & help with this over the weekend. Walkerma 18:40, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Albums does have about 30K unassessed articles (yeah, I balked at that too) so they obviously do need a lot of work. If there would be any way to get the bot to just create a page listing the unassessed-articles by project (and maybe by importance?) that might help a lot when and if the albums backlog ever gets reduced to a managable number. John Carter 19:03, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not taking on any major new tasks until exams are over (about two weeks from now), then I'll see if PockBot will work. If that fails, I have a collection of "this would be nice" things which I raise in discussions periodically. My priority right now is trying to get Version 0.7 active and MartinBotII operating - but I'll make sure I raise this idea when emailing or posting in the next few weeks.  It's also quite possible that MartinBotII could be easily adapted to do this if PockBot can't. Till then we should perhaps help the songs or albums people?  Thanks for all your sterling work, and I also saw your valiant efforts in talking to Bus Stop about Bob Dylan! Cheers, Walkerma 02:58, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Music venues
The assessment for this wikiproject has not updated in 4 days. Not quite sure what to do. Acidskater 02:10, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, it looks as if someone at your project has used this link to update the list, since Music venues is one of the few projects to have a May 7 log entry! Checking the index, it looks as if the letter A projects were updated on May 6, but many lists have not been updated since May 2.  However the bot is hard at work (going through the Is as I type this), so I expect it will update the Ms later today. Walkerma 03:15, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

WP:Cyprus stats/quality page
I've setup everything to work properly and it does for the most part, the only problem I can see right now is this stats/quality page: Cyprus articles by quality. I don't get why it says Wikipedia:WikiProject Cypriot and Contact with WP Cypriot instead of Wikipedia:WikiProject Cyprus and Contact with WP Cyprus. Is there something I did wrong? How do I correct it, if it is wrong? User: (talk • contribs) 23:29, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Sorry I missed this post coming in. From what I understand, the bot generates the name of the project automatically from the category name.  Since the category is called "Cypriot articles by quality" it generates the project name as WikiProject:Cypriot.  I was involved a little in setting up the Good Articles project in this scheme recently, and it created "WikiProject Good" which I thought might make a nice new project to spread Wikilove!  There are two solutions to your problem:

Thanks for using the bot, and enjoy your trip to Greece! Walkerma 01:06, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Create a redirect from WP:Cypriot to WP:Cyprus (this is what I did with the WP:Good)
 * 2) Rename the category "Cyprus articles by quality"


 * Thank you very much!!!! El Greco (talk · contribs) 15:13, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Downgrading an article
I want to ask about assessment rating. I know that any article can move up to GA or FA status regardless of their previous ratings as long as they meet the criteria. When a GA article is downgraded, it's pretty obvious that this article belongs to B class. However, when a FA article downgrades, which class does it go back to? A class? GA class? Or B class? A good example is Gene. There doesn't seem to have a "safety net" to "catch" these articles when they are demoted. OhanaUnited 13:42, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
 * A-Class is basically, "Just needs a bit of work to be FA". So if the FA failed because of something fairly minor, and it could reasonably be renominated in a month or so, then it is probably A.  If it failed for a whole bunch of reasons, and needs a lot of work, then it's B.  Walkerma 01:11, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Follow-up question, though. If an FA had previously passed GA, and is then downgraded, would it be downgraded to GA, which it had earlier passed, or not? John Carter 20:54, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The only way GA status can be revoked is by going through GAR, just as with FA/FAR. So it would be at least GA.  I've sometimes tagged such things as A-Class, if I've thought the FAR was a close call; nearly all GAs these days would also be A-Class. Walkerma 04:48, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Veterinary medicine
Hi, I was wondering if someone could help setup the assessment code for WikiProject Veterinary medicine. I copied/adapted the code from WikiProject Cats, but I'm not sure how/where to create the various other pages and categories that are needed (and still need more coffee...). Much thanks :) --Quiddity 17:39, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you :) --Quiddity 19:31, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Yorkshire
Hi, I thought that I hade dropped entries to the appropriate categories to get the bot to operate last night. Though the categories were later modified by another user. Wondered if there was something I was missing from the instructions that would cause bot not to operate on them.

Thanks

Keith D 10:54, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Texas A&M
I am running the bot though are brand new wikiproject. it seems like the bot is unable to create an "&" symbol. it creates a page called "Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Texas A" I was wondering if you guys could take a look at our wikiproject to see what we are doing wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Texas_A%26M Oldag07 00:00, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

LGBT Log page not updating?
Hi! I've just run the bot on Category:LGBT articles by quality. It updates the statistics page, but it doesn't update the log page. Any ideas why? Thanks! -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 16:47, 8 July 2007 (UTC)


 * There looks to be a general problem as the latest BOT run has not updated any of the log files towards the end of its cycle. Keith D 17:21, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Sorry, that was a bug I introduced recently. I fixed it now. Thanks for noticing. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:25, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Help
Where and how do I ask for articles to be rated? Fainites barley 19:55, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to remove the main biography project from the bot run
See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

FA count
Where's all these FAs coming from? Featured articles says we currently have 1,652, but according to this page, we have 1,894! That's a big difference. Can anyone explain this? Rocket000 18:52, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * My guess would be that maybe several FAs are assessed at different importance grades by various projects, and that those articles are showing up under each importance grade. That's just a guess, though. John Carter 18:55, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No, I think Oleg was strict about not double counting any article. This is a standard problem - the difference is caused by FLs listed as FA-Class, I believe. If you take a look at the list I think that should confirm that. Walkerma (talk) 22:56, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Percent of articles w/ a wikiproject
There are 1268521 articles w/ a wikiproject dividing this by the number of total articles of 2,121,722 we get 59.787333119041985707835428015546% (about 3 out of 5) of articles have a wikiproject --Java7837 (talk) 21:52, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Probably extremely difficult, if not impossible, proposal
Sit down; this one'll take awhile. As noted above, we currently have roughly 60% of all articles tagged. Less than that total number have yet to be assessed, however. Also, some projects which have assessment capacity haven't yet assessed many articles. This can't really help that much. Also, many projects do not do a very good job of keeping up with GAs, FAs, and Release Version selections, which doesn't help either. On the basis of all of the above, I was wondering what the rest of you might think of a proposal like this. Feel free to offer any adjustments if certain provisions are to blatantly impossible. Many of these provisions involve subjects I know nothing whatsoever about, so I expect to be told some things aren't workable.
 * (1) To help in at least tagging articles, perhaps we could set up a system whereby every project would be asked to just tag the individual categories which they believe to be relevant to their project, and then have all the bots we can corral into the effort to place the relevant banners on the articles in those categories. Not all categories will necessarily be covered by this effort, but I think most would be. Also, for categories which relate to several projects in part, those categories wouldn't receive automatic tagging for all the possibly related articles if the banners weren't placed there. By having all the articles tagged for as many projects at once, it would also greatly speed the assessment process, as only one person would have to assess each article, as opposed to having each project assess it individually as the banner is placed. If, of course, individual projects wish to have assessments done only by members of that project, I think (?) it might not be too hard to add a parameter to the banner to indiciate as much.
 * (2) At roughly the same time that the bot tagging spree starts, a separate list of newly created articles could be created. When the assessment spree is finished, the newly created articles would be the only ones which would possibly receive similar automatic banner placement, based on categorization, possibly on a regular basis (once a week, perhaps). This would also make it much easier for projects to keep up with new relevant articles. After the tagging spree is over, however, the projects which were involved in that effort would not receive the same total review and banner placement, but would only have banners placed on new articles by the bot like any other. New projects which had not yet received such automated assistance could request banner placement for them separately at request.
 * (3) Finally, the part that might be relevant to this project. I note that many projects do not yet specifically indicate on the project page which articles have been selected or are candidates for selection in release editions. So far as I can tell, it might be a fairly simple process (if I'm wrong, let me know) to have a separate bot automatically update a page for each project, which would list for that project the featured articles, pictures, lists, topics, sounds, GAs, and DYKs which have been tagged for that project, to help ensure that that content be included in articles included in the 1.0 release. Portal maintainers would love to have such automatic updating I think in particular. Also, we could add to that possible subpage a listing of the articles which have been included or nominated for inclusion in release versions. By doing so, we might have a better chance of getting some of the relevant projects to concentrate a bit more attention on some of the weaker included articles.
 * Anyway, I know that there are probably several places in this proposal where I've made assumptions which make it virtually impossible to enact, particularly regarding bot involvement. But, if it were possible, it would address some of the problems we have regarding assessment and attention to release articles. John Carter (talk) 15:06, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Some WikiProjects have banners but don't have any assessment code within those banners. In other words, the talk pages are tagged but this project doesn't know anything about them. The best way to address that issue would be to discover which Projects aren't taking part and re-invite them (or, unilaterally add the code to their templates if we're considering this a mandatory function of WikiProjects).
 * Of course, some projects have a banner but haven't tagged all their articles. In those cases, category trawls are indeed the usual approach and there are many bot ops who would do the job.
 * It ought then to be possible to get a list of all articles this project doesn't know about (i.e. a list of all articles minus known), and stick a generic assessment template onto their talk pages. No need for category trawls I would have thought.
 * I'm not saying any of this is desirable or uncontroversial (it may well be the opposite), merely pointing out a possibly easier route technically. --kingboyk (talk) 16:39, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Might work. Would there be any way to create another automatically updated page, like the Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality, for each assessing project which could list the FAs, FFAs, GAs, DGAs, Featured Lists, Featured Sounds, and 1.0 Editorial Team nominees and selections? That was the objective of the proposal above. Particularly informing the projects of the 1.0 selections struck me as valuable. Also, potentially, it might be possible to create another list which would automatically remove from it any FAs, etc., which have already been selection for inclusion in a release version, possibly making some of the work of the 1.0 team easier. John Carter (talk) 18:40, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Robotics
I am trying to kickstart a somewhat new/became dead WikiProject. It seems like after its creation, no one knew about it and the list of proposed members dwindled into a couple people. Anyways, I've set up project banners, sidebars, and now I'm trying to get this whole assessment deal squared away. I've been working with WP:UNI a little bit, and I've noticed that I cannot get that table of # of articles vs. assessment class made. It looks like a bot operation, which I've ran http://www.math.ucla.edu/~aoleg/wp/wp10/run_wp10.cgi the bot]] for Robotics already, but I don't know how to view the results yet (part of it might also be I don't know how to seek out all of the robotics articles and then assess all of them, and then get it on that table). If I can get some pointers as to how I could do all of that, I'd appreciate it. Thanks! - Jameson L. Tai  talk ♦ contribs 08:17, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * It is a bot operation. I'll look into it and see what I can do. John Carter (talk) 16:16, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much! <font face="Calibri" size="4px" color="#000066">- Jameson L. Tai  <font face="Calibri" color="#660000">talk ♦ contribs  17:04, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Assessment
Hi all. It is commndable to see efforts to rate articles with the aim of improving quality. The system being adopted is no doubt helping as a fairly crude classification system. Without collecting and analysing any rating data, it's difficult to say how effective the process is. If anyone is interested in refining the system, let me know. There are ways to improve the assessment system. Like anything worth doing, they involve some work. It seems these some emphasis is being place on these ratings. While I do not have any problem with them being used heuristically, as an expert in the area, I have strong (but constructive) criticism regarding them being used to make important determinations. I have not had a great deal of time to edit lately, and am not sure exactly what they are being used for. I do know, however, that ratings tend to get treated by many as a lot more precise and valid than they actually are. I have suggested elswhere ways of doing ratings more rigorously. If anyone is interested, I'll tell you more. Cheers Holon (talk) 07:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am definitely very interested in trying to make the assessment system better. I was the one who advocated the use of the current system for WP1.0, because at the time the entire project was hamstrung by the complete absence of assessments.  The present system (IMHO) works remarkably well for something so crude - I think its very simplicity has made it easy for thousands of different people to apply it in many different situations.  But the system does clearly have major limitations, and of course you're right that it can get treated as more precise than it is.  If we can make it better, we should!
 * Having watched the system grow, I would say that there are three main things to consider when trying to revamp the system:
 * There must be a mechanism for making the changes to the system without complete meltdown. There are over one million assessments already done on the English Wikipedia, and around 180,000 on the French WP, so people have already invested MANY hours of their time in the present system.  Thus it's unrealistic to say, "OK, from next month we'll switch to a three-variable 10 point scale and the old assessments will no longer work."  It is realistic to say, "OK, we have a new tool that will help make your assessing more reliable and reproducible".
 * There are two main variables involved, content and presentation, but these are in effect rolled into one. In the early development of an article, content is desperately needed, and this is the main focus of the assessment.  As the article becomes fairly complete, we worry more about the quality of the prose, and style issues.  The reason for continuing to have both A and GA levels is a reflection the two different variables: A-Class represents the project's view that the content is complete and accurate, whereas GA indicates that an expert reviewer considers the presentation of that content is of a high standard.  A GA reviewer cannot judge whether an article on copper(I) chloride has enough content to be "complete", but a consensus at the Chemicals Wikiproject is much more able to judge this.  I accept that this "two-variable" description is itself a simplification, but it gets much closer to the truth than a simple one dimensional assessment of quality.
 * Any assessment scheme must be robust and straightforward enough that it will be applicable to anything from an article about a railway station to a chemical element, from a minor character on Star Trek to an article like nature. It should be something that allows even a relative newcomer to WP to assess articles quickly and easily.
 * The base feature is that the system should be able to separate the quality articles from the dross, and the current system does, by and large, do that (see our latest test data, which are selected based on both importance and quality). However, anything that can make the system more reliable, without it becoming unduly burdensome, would be extremely valuable.  I think such things could be done, using things like rubrics (perhaps like the one used at WP:MILHIST?), bots, scripts and other tools (such as this?), and probably others that you may suggest.
 * We are also deep into testing our algorithm for assessing article importance, and I'd really appreciate your input on that if you have the time. We will probably be fixing the formula in the next month or two, so now is the time to voice your opinion.  See the discussion here; we are currently working with "Score7".  You will probably cringe at much of the discussion, which is very subjective, but I have also looked at the mathematical balance of parameters and Score7 looks to have things pretty well balanced, IMHO.  Our initial output is here, with quality ratings included, and we are presently adjusting the balance between the projects which assess for importance and those which don't.  I'm also locating a reference point for each project, to allow us to adjust for importance of project area (e.g., Arizona vs Arizona road transportation).  Many thanks, I really appreciate your offer! Please help! Walkerma (talk) 16:14, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey Martin. I've just had another look at the grading sheme. What you have is a relatively crude system of classifying articles into ordered categories of quality, based on a global judgement. For this purpose, it is actually a really strong design in my view. From research I've been involved in, the written descriptions of criteria are not nearly so powerful as the exemplars. (It's all very well describing in words what you should see, but what does all of that actually look like in an actual article?). The fact you have examples of every category/classification is a enormous advantage.
 * Following from this, the single simplest thing to add precision without changing anything is to add exemplars to more sharply define the borders or thresholds of the classifications. The classifications are big buckets with these kinds of schemes. There is an enormous range of quality, from a few poorly written sentences to exceptional articles on Wikipedia. To cut this up into seven classifications is fine, just as long as you keep in mind they must be big buckets; i.e. each represents a large range of quality. It will often be easy to say something is right in the middle of the GA classification when it is. The problem is when someone is tossing up between GA and A, it becomes more difficult. My advice would be that if this is important, do two things (i) select a set of possible exemplar articles in the range (already rated) (ii) have more than one rater go through a process of pairwise comparison betwen the articles, including the examples already listed. This data can be analysed for internal consistency and anomalous articles (not consistently rated) can be identified. It doesn't, by the way, matter how you assess, pairwise comparisons will always be implied by an assessment process, and it is better to do this directly particularly when setting things up. You can then choose an article that defines the upper limit of one classification and another the lower limit of the next classification up. This would give a lot more precision to the classification system, exactly as it is. Putting extra time in, up front, to establish a good, consistently rated set of exemplars can save enormous amounts of time for the many people out there struggling to rate, particularly when it comes to the border of one classification and the next up.
 * Clearly, the scheme doesn't allow something to be rated higher with respect to certain criteria and lower with respect to others, and there's a risk in this kind of format that the rating reflects the worst aspect -- I can elaborate on the reasons if you like. The set-out and logic of your system can easily be generalized to allow ratings in relation to separate criteria. However, this would involve a lot of work and I doubt it is realistic. That said, it doesn't need to be one or the other. You could have a more elaborated scheme broken down into criteria, with exemplars for each criterion, that works with the main system -- used for difficult-to-assess or disputed assessments but not otherwise. This would take some work to set up and use, I just mention it for the sake of completeness.
 * Regarding the algorithm for assessing importance, I'll take a look when I have time. You're up against a pretty big challenge there. I understand all to well the reasons people want "objective" data for such systems. Three points. First, you're often faced with a choice between rather indirect and/or impoverished objective data versus "subjective" data. Second point, subjective is not necessarily synonymous with inconsistent. Third point, the two are not mutually exclusive -- hits and so forth can be used to filter/classify and people can also rate importance on substantive grounds. Again, I'd highly recommend (human) pairwise comparisons to sort things in order of importance. Lastly, on this, it is good you are taking logs, this is generally a good thing to do with counts (such as hits, links), because the counts tend to be things that increase exponentially as a function of what you want to measure. However, again I have to say this is a challenging one. It's interesting too, though, so I will indeed try to give what input I can.
 * Anyhow, please treat these as an opening few points and ask questions if needed -- there are many options with these things, it's possible to use some key principles in a smart way to get flexibility without too much compromise. If there is a single point I would stress above all others -- in assessment and measurement, it tends to be the case that people avoid some up front work that would save a lot of time in the long run. It took centuries of developments, theoretical and technical, to produce thermometers that we can just buy from a pharmacy and use with incredible precision. Don't lose sight of the up-front work it takes to make measurement easy yet precise. If there's the will, there are many ways. Regards. Holon (talk) 04:07, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
 * This sounds to be a very workable suggestion, thanks. I was hoping to post a longer reply today, but it's reached 3am and I need some sleep!  I'll try to respond in more detail tomorrow.  Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 07:07, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Don't worry, get to it when you can -- I won't have much time in the next few days anyhow. Cheers Holon (talk) 03:55, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I've set up a central discussion area - please post additional comments over there.

What's wrong with this table?
This table only shows the articles assessed as stubs but not the other classes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Opera_articles_by_quality_statistics

Can anyone fix it? Best regards, -- Ssilvers (talk) 21:59, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Assistance with bot
I'm probably being dumb, but I can't fathom why the bot isn't picking up the importance splits on Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Gymnastics articles by quality statistics. IfI'm being dumb, how do I go about fixing this? Thanks! -- ratarsed (talk) 18:43, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
 * It's probably because the bot doesn't like Category:WikiProject Gymnastics articles by importance when there exists Category:Gymnastics articles by quality. (Note that there is no "WikiProject" in the category name.) Renaming the importance category to use the same format as the quality category should fix things. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 18:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Told you I was being dumb -- thanks for that, all working now :) -- ratarsed (talk) 19:10, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Re-assessment
Can anybody help on how to ask for a re-assessment? Reactive attachment disorder (a DSM and ICD-10 classification) was assessed as mid-importance and Attachment disorder (a vague term) was assessed as high. This really ought to be the other way round. Its not particularly important but I can't work out who decides these things. Fainites barley 23:52, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Importance can be hard to assess, particularly outside your area of expertise. Thanks for fixing it, I see it's been changed.  These assessments are organized and done by the relevant WikiProject, in this case WikiProject Psychology; if there's some discussion needed, it should be raised there.  Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 03:24, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Assessment tools
The project page says "People conducting assessments are encouraged to use/evaluate Outriggr's tool (currently being beta tested).". The problem is that Outrigger has recently had the script deleted is there an alternative tool that can be used to perform assessments? Keith D (talk) 22:11, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Pyrospirit has taken over this script, it's the metadata.js script linked from here. I'll try to update the link from here. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 15:46, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the information. Keith D (talk) 16:01, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Omission of WikiProject Primates
Is there are reason why WikiProject Primates was omitted from the automated selection of articles for Version 0.7? - Visionholder (talk) 02:48, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * We're baffled by that - I had reviewed the Primates project so it was on our list, but the bot skipped over it for some reason. We'll try to find the problem ASAP and generate a list. Walkerma (talk) 01:52, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject ITC Entertainment
Hi there - just wanted to leave a note saying that the ITC Entertainment Wikiproject is active and an ongoing project. I saw that a note was left on the project discussion page a long time ago but no response had been given from us (for my part, it was during a time when I wasn't very active on WP). Howie &#9742;  14:31, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way to find those articles that have two assessment characteristics? (i.e. High Importance, Stub) or such

 * When assessing articles, is there a way to drill down and find those that are at the intersection of TWO qualities? (I.e. stub, but high importance, or such), when using this sort of table of evaluations: Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Theatre articles by quality statistics Mdukas (talk) 22:47, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

WP Ontario roads
Not sure what's changed with the latest release, but with the manual tool down, I can't find how to create an assessment table for Category:Ontario_road_articles_by_quality. I can make one on the Toolserver, but the page on wikipedia (Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Ontario_road_articles_by_quality_statistics) is blank, despite there being an entry on the index.

What'd I b0rk? -  ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ  <sup style="color:#3AAA3A;">τ <sub style="color:#3AAA3A;">¢  18:34, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Tagging redirects
I noticed that several wikiprojects put assessment tags on redirect pages. Does 1.0 have any official opinion on this? Doing so has some organizational benifits, but it also greatly inflates the class=NA category and gives a lot of extra work to the bot, so I was wondering whether the people running Work Via Wikiprojects care either way. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 05:00, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikiproject: U.S. Public Policy Requesting Assessment Volunteers
The | Public Policy Initiative is recruiting Wikipedians to assess article quality improvement. We are testing the metric for consistency and to see if there are differences between Wikipedian scores and subject matter expert scores. We are looking to identify the strengths and weakness of the current assessment system since we are using that system to evaluate article quality improvement through the project. Check out WikiProject: U.S. Public Policy if interested. Thanks! ARoth (Public Policy Initiative) (talk) 23:48, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Article Incubator Assessments - Graduates vs. Candidates
Greetings. I'm working with the WP:Article Incubator, and would like to improve the assessment structure. Currently only articles that have graduated out of the Incubator are assessed (see Category:Article Incubator articles by quality). But the Candidate articles are not. Candidate articles are outside of mainspace, and are 'works in progress' (see: Category:Articles in the Article Incubator).

Is it possible to set up assessments for the Candidate articles, even though they are outside the mainspace? For example, Move Category:Article Incubator articles by quality to Category:Article Incubator Graduate Articles by quality, then Create Category:Article Incubator Candidate Articles by quality. So the Incubator would end up with 2 assessment groups, one for public articles, and one for internal work. Thanks. Eclipsed  ¤     11:05, 3 November 2010 (UTC)