Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cognitive science/Archive 1

Thanks and welcome
Thanks a lot to Torchiest for his userbox template (see the project page) and a category for projects participants: Category:WikiProject Cognitive science members. And of course, welcome to the project, Torchiest! —㓟 (talk) 15:00, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Assessing articles
Please refer to the assessment page for some basic information. 㓟 (talk) 11:48, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Requested move of Internal model to "Internal model (motor control)"
I have suggested to move the article (also see above on this talk page) for reasons supplied at Talk:Internal model. Please discuss! 㓟 (talk) 14:22, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Has been moved. There is a disambig page now: Internal model. 㓟 (talk) 10:00, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

RfD of Relevance problem
I have proposed the redirect page Relevance problem (which redirects to Relevance realization) for deletion. Please see WP:Redirects_for_discussion/Log/2013_April_14 and discuss! Kindly, 㓟 (talk) 17:48, 14 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Both articles have been deleted. 㓟 (talk) 09:42, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggested merge: Frame problem
I have suggested to merge Frame problem (philosophy) into Frame problem. Please let us know your opinion! Regards, 㓟 (talk) 11:04, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Welcome to a new project participant
As a young project we should welcome our new project participant User:SunnyJulia. A new user, she has taken an extensive effort in writing a new article on Cross-cultural differences in decision making. Thank you very much! 㓟 (talk) 09:46, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Merger proposal
It has been proposed to merge or not merge Categorization and Taxonomy (general). See Talk:Categorization. Kind regards, 㓟 (talk) 21:00, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Comparative Cognition Society
Hi everyone. I am working on an article about the CCS. It is in my sandbox, any help or advice is welcome. Oh yeah it is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dbrodbeck/sandbox/CCS Dbrodbeck (talk) 11:20, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi and thank you! I like the article so far, just two short comments: 1. you might add refs to the lead, 2. please don't introduce any redlinks. Kind regards, 㓟 (talk) 12:58, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Done... I think I will paste it into namespace later this week.  So, others feel free to improve it in the meantime.  Dbrodbeck (talk) 13:49, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Life and Death in Assisted Living - seniors
Frontline (U.S. TV series) will be running Life and Death in Assisted Living on Tuesday July 30th: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/pressroom/frontline-propublica-investigate-assisted-living-in-america/ Please contribute to discussion Talk:Assisted_living XOttawahitech (talk) 02:53, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Project added to alerts subscription list
Just to let you know I have added this wikiproj to Article alerts/Subscription list. Hope this helps, XOttawahitech (talk) 20:19, 1 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much! Kind regards, 㓟 (talk) 15:18, 3 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Looks like alerts have not been activated yet for this project, I guess we need to be patient. XOttawahitech (talk) 23:41, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Welcome another participant
Thanks to User:Falk Lieder for his interest and participation! It is nice to have an expert on computational CS, and I am looking forward to reading Griffiths, T.L., Lieder, F., & Goodman, N.D. (submitted). Levels of analysis between the computational and the algorithmic. Topics in Cognitive Science. Kind regards, 㓟 (talk) 19:11, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!


Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Invitation to Participate in a WikiProject Study
Hello Wikipedians,

We’d like to invite you to participate in a study that aims to explore how WikiProject members coordinate activities of distributed group members to complete project goals. We are specifically seeking to talk to people who have been active in at least one WikiProject in their time in Wikipedia. Compensation will be provided to each participant in the form of a $10 Amazon gift card.

The purpose of this study is to better understanding the coordination practices of Wikipedians active within WikiProjects, and to explore the potential for tool-mediated coordination to improve those practices. Interviews will be semi-structured, and should last between 45-60 minutes. If you decide to participate, we will schedule an appointment for the online chat session. During the appointment you will be asked some basic questions about your experience interacting in WikiProjects, how that process has worked for you in the past and what ideas you might have to improve the future.

You must be over 18 years old, speak English, and you must currently be or have been at one time an active member of a WikiProject. The interview can be conducted over an audio chatting channel such as Skype or Google Hangouts, or via an instant messaging client. If you have questions about the research or are interested in participating, please contact Michael Gilbert at (206) 354-3741 or by email at mdg@uw.edu.

We cannot guarantee the confidentiality of information sent by email.

The link to the relevant research page is m:Research:Means_and_methods_of_coordination_in_WikiProjects

Ryzhou (talk) 02:22, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 3
Greetings! For this month's issue...

We have demos!

After a lengthy research and design process, we decided for WikiProject X to focus on two things:
 * A WikiProject workflow that focuses on action items: discussions you can participate in and tasks you can perform to improve the encyclopedia; and
 * An automatically updating WikiProject directory that gives you lists of users participating in the WikiProject and editing in that subject area.

We have a live demonstration of the new WikiProject workflow at WikiProject Women in Technology, a brand new WikiProject that was set up as an adjunct to a related edit-a-thon in Washington, DC. The goal is to surface action items for editors, and we intend on doing that through automatically updated working lists. We are looking into using SuggestBot to generate lists of outstanding tasks, and we are looking into additional options for automatic worklist generation. This takes the burden off of WikiProject editors to generate these worklists, though there is also a "requests" section for Wikipedians to make individual requests. (As of writing, these automated lists are not yet live, so you will see a blank space under "edit articles" on the demo WikiProject. Sorry about that!) I invite you to check out the WikiProject and leave feedback on WikiProject X's talk page.

Once the demo is sufficiently developed, we will be working on a limited deployment on our pilot WikiProjects. We have selected five for the first round of testing based on the highest potential for impact and will scale up from there.

While a re-designed WikiProject experience is much needed, that alone isn't enough. A WikiProject isn't any good if people have no way of discovering it. This is why we are also developing an automatically updated WikiProject directory. This directory will surface project-related metrics, including a count of active WikiProject participants and of active editors in that project's subject area. The purpose of these metrics is to highlight how active the WikiProject is at the given point of time, but also to highlight that project's potential for success. The directory is not yet live but there is a demonstration featuring a sampling of WikiProjects.

Each directory entry will link to a WikiProject description page which automatically list the active WikiProject participants and subject-area article editors. This allows Wikipedians to find each other based on the areas they are interested in, and this information can be used to revive a WikiProject, start a new one, or even for some other purpose. These description pages are not online yet, but they will use this template, if you want to get a feel of what they will look like.

We need volunteers!

WikiProject X is a huge undertaking, and we need volunteers to support our efforts, including testers and coders. Check out our volunteer portal and see what you can do to help us!

As an aside...

Wouldn't it be cool if lists of requested articles could not only be integrated directly with WikiProjects, but also shared between WikiProjects? Well, we got the crazy idea of having experimental software feature Flow deployed (on a totally experimental basis) on the new Article Request Workshop, which seeks to be a place where editors can "workshop" article ideas before they get created. It uses Flow because Flow allows, essentially, section-level categorization, and in the future will allow "sections" (known as "topics" within Flow) to be included across different pages. What this means is that you have a recommendation for a new article tagged by multiple WikiProjects, allowing for the recommendation to appear on lists for each WikiProject. This will facilitate inter-WikiProject collaboration and will help to reduce duplicated work. The Article Request Workshop is not entirely ready yet due to some bugs with Flow, but we hope to integrate it into our pilot WikiProjects at some point.

Harej (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Size
I'd like some input on what needs to be done to improve the "Perception of size" part of the article on Size. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:21, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 4
Newsletter • May/June 2015

Hello friends! We have been hard at work these past two months. For this report:

The directory is live!

For the first time, we are happy to bring you an exhaustive, comprehensive WikiProject Directory. This directory endeavors to list every single WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, including those that don't participate in article assessment. In constructing the broadest possible definition, we have come up with a list of approximately 2,600 WikiProjects. The directory tracks activity statistics on the WikiProject's pages, and, for where it's available, statistics on the number of articles tracked by the WikiProject and the number of editors active on those articles. Complementing the directory are description pages for each project, listing usernames of people active on the WikiProject pages and the articles in the WikiProject's scope. This will help Wikipedians interested in a subject find each other, whether to seek feedback on an article or to revive an old project. (There is an opt-out option.) We have also come up with listings of related WikiProjects, listing the ten most relevant WikiProjects based on what articles they have in common. We would like to promote WikiProjects as interconnected systems, rather than isolated silos.

A tremendous amount of work went into preparing this directory. WikiProjects do not consistently categorize their pages, meaning we had to develop our own index to match WikiProjects with the articles in their scope. We also had to make some adjustments to how WikiProjects were categorized; indeed, I personally have racked up a few hundred edits re-categorizing WikiProjects. There remains more work to be done to make the WikiProject directory truly useful. In the meantime, take a look and feel free to leave feedback at the WikiProject X talk page.

Stuff in the works!

What have we been working on?


 * A new design template—This has been in the works for a while, of course. But our goal is to design something that is useful and cleanly presented on all browsers and at all screen resolutions while working within the confines of what MediaWiki has to offer. Additionally, we are working on designs for the sub-components featured on the main project page.
 * A new WikiProject talk page banner in Lua—Work has begun on implementing the WikiProject banner in Lua. The goal is to create a banner template that can be usable by any WikiProject in lieu of having its own template. Work has slowed down for now to focus on higher priority items, but we are interested in your thoughts on how we could go about creating a more useful project banner. We have a draft module on Test Wikipedia, with a demonstration.
 * New discussion reports—We have over 4.8 million articles on the English Wikipedia, and almost as many talk pages as well. But what happens when someone posts on a talk page? What if no one is watching that talk page? We are currently testing out a system for an automatically-updating new discussions list, like RFC for WikiProjects. We currently have five test pages up for the WikiProjects on cannabis, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and Ghana.
 * SuggestBot for WikiProjects—We have asked the maintainer of SuggestBot to make some minor adjustments to SuggestBot that will allow it to post regular reports to those WikiProjects that ask for them. Stay tuned!
 * Semi-automated article assessment—Using the new revision scoring service and another system currently under development, WikiProjects will be getting a new tool to facilitate the article assessment process by providing article quality/importance predictions for articles yet to be assessed. Aside from helping WikiProjects get through their backlogs, the goal is to help WikiProjects with collecting metrics and triaging their work. Semi-automation of this process will help achieve consistent results and keep the process running smoothly, as automation does on other parts of Wikipedia.

Want us to work on any other tools? Interested in volunteering? Leave a note on our talk page.

The WikiProject watchers report is back!

The database report which lists WikiProjects according to the number of watchers (i.e., people that have the project on their watchlist), is back! The report stopped being updated a year ago, following the deactivation of the Toolserver, but a replacement report has been generated.

Until next time, Harej (talk) 22:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Candidate for pilot testing, round one
Hello, WikiProject Cognitive science!

On the recommendation of Snow Rise, I am happy to announce that this WikiProject has been selected for the first round of WikiProject X pilot testing! Pilot testing candidates were selected on the basis for potential success of the WikiProject.

The goal of WikiProject X is to improve the WikiProject experience through research, design, and experimentation. On that basis, we've prepared a new WikiProject design template based around modules. These modules include features you are already familiar with, such as article alerts, but also new features such as automated work lists, a feed of discussions taking place on the 374 talk pages tagged by WikiProject Cognitive science, and a new member profile system with opt-in notifications. The new design is available for your review at WikiProject Cognitive science/New. Please let me know what you think. (Note that some of the modules depend on output from other bots, meaning there will be some visual inconsistencies for now. I hope to resolve this in the long term.)

The next steps:
 * 1) If you are all satisfied with the design, I will implement it on the WikiProject page. Unless there are major points of contention, I hope to get this done by Friday, July 10.
 * 2) Using information from WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Cognitive science, I will work on recruiting new members for the WikiProject. I will also reach out to your current listed members.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Cheers, Harej (talk) 00:33, 8 July 2015 (UTC)


 * This is basically an orphan WikiProject. It was started in 2012 on the sole initiative of an editor who has not contributed to Wikipedia since 2013.  And it doesn't really even have a proper domain:  WikiProject Psychology and WikiProject Neuroscience taken together cover the same ground.  If you are interested in trying to reinvigorate WikiProject Psychology, I think that would be much more useful.  That project is relatively dormant at the moment, but at least it has a substantial history.  If you wanted to work with WikiProject Neuroscience, you would find at least a few people prepared to participate (I have been maintaining the project since around 2010.) Looie496 (talk) 13:13, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the feedback, Looie496. In picking WikiProjects for this first round I deliberately picked low activity projects that have potential for being reactivated; basically, where there's "nothing to lose." This way, if something breaks, I am not ruining a perfectly good WikiProject. Psychology seems to be a modestly active project at the moment. Neuroscience could use more activity, but no one signed it up for pilot testing (that's trivial to fix, of course). What if we merged this project into Neuroscience? Harej (talk) 16:15, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what merging a WikiProject implies. Looie496 (talk) 16:37, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Merging would mean re-directing WikiProject Cognitive science to WikiProject Neuroscience and replacing WikiProject Cognitive Science templates and categories with those of WikiProject Neuroscience. Of course, as you point out, this project isn't purely focused on neuroscience, but a mixture of neuroscience and psychology. So it's a matter of organizing strategy whether to develop a niche project around this specific field of study or to fold into a large project and focus on that project instead. What will organize and motivate the most editors? What will best lead to improved coverage on the subject of cognitive science on Wikipedia? Harej (talk) 17:13, 8 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Sorry to be late to the discussion; I've been semi-inactive the last two months and initially missed the notice.   Anyway, I'm inclined to agree that there are significant issues with trying to merge WikiProject Cognitive Science into WikiProject Neuroscience, owing to the fact Cognitive Science is an umbrella term for an interdisciplinary area that includes influences not just from psychology and neuroscience, but also linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence/machine learning, biophysics and a glut of other fields of inquiry.   I think it's arguably true that if you had to pick just two those super-domains that constituted the core of what we are referencing when we talk about cognitive science, they would be psychology and neuroscience, but even so, merging this space directly with either would constitute two great a reduction of the overall concept.


 * The upside is that I think, like me, most of our editors who contribute in the field of cognitive science come at it from the prospective of biopsychology, meaning that if we improve the operation of any of the three projects you've referenced, we improve collaboration on the same basic span of articles.  So this to me suggests we can either recruit editors from Wikiproject Neuroscience and WikiProject Psychology to operate here, or we can try to augment efforts on those two spaces (which are certainly busier than here, but, last I checked, by no means hopping with activity) to much the same effect.  FYI, I'm still happy to contribute if/when the new pilot testing rolls out toolsets for sending out notices to reinvigorate things (or contribute in whatever way which may help, regardless of the project) but I am coming into an extremely busy part of my year in the coming months, so my contributions will vary considerably from week to week.   S n o w  let's rap 21:49, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, interesting, I see some of the notice functions have now been built directly into the interface, such that users can opt into them when they join the project. That's a clever approach.  Is the notice a ping or bot-delivered talk page message? Are you looking to similarly automate the processes for inviting new members to a project if they have contributed to a certain number of articles within it's purview?  S n o w  let's rap 22:05, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Help please - I'm trying to start a list somewhere on Wikipedia of human abilities that will be tough for artificial intelligence
I am completely new to Wikipedia contribution.

We Wikipedia contributors need to start a list of abilities, qualities, and experiences of humans that will be difficult for an artificial intelligence to have.

Wikipedia already has an entry "Outline of thought"; therefore, the list I propose should be appropriate for Wikipedia proper (as opposed to WikiProjects, WikiBooks, etc.).

I wrote to the help/info email address info-en-o@wikimedia.org.

This is what I wrote:

---

My question will refer to Portal:Artificial_intelligence

The title of the Wikipedia Portal is Artificial Intelligence.

Please see the section on the right hand side, "Major Problems of AI."

I have an idea that is completely appropriate to be made available at Wikipedia.

The idea is a list of human abilities that artificial intelligence will have trouble with.

This is a similar category to "Major Problems of AI."

The concept I envision is different to it, however, because it will be an extremely long list of specific abilities written in layman's English.

Of course the list should be arranged in categories.

One such category could be "Emotion."

"Major Problems of AI" has some items which inform "Emotion" (Reasoning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and strong AI), but if one clicks each of those links and reads them, so little of the content pertains to emotion directly.

In addition to "Emotion," here are examples of other items in the list I propose: Creativity, Imagination, Art, and Humor, each of which can be broken down. For example, Art can be broken down into Music, Dance, Literature, Visual Art, and so on. Emotion as an item in the list can be broken down into Anger, Fear, Joy, Sorrow, Humiliation, Pride, and so on.

A section of this list that I propose would be a list of experiences that an artificial intelligence would have trouble with -- for example, what it's like to raise a child, grow old, feel physical pain, feel lazy, feel jealousy (there's overlap with the emotions list here), what it's like to experience a hallucination or illusion, to miss or mourn over a loved one, to experience camaraderie, to lead a group of people, to smell what humans can smell, to experience what petting a dog feels like as a sensation and as a psychological experience, to feel bias, to have or reject religious faith, to deceive a human; other qualia, and so on.

Again, the list will be extremely long. They will be categorized. This corpus of content will be enormous [like the entry "Outline of thought"], which makes it appropriate for Wikipedia.

One benefit of it: it will inform designers and theorists of artificial intelligence.

Another benefit is that it will inform the general public and students of the field in an accessible, easily understood way.

Eventually as users peruse the list, they will have to ask questions like, "Must an entity be a wet, mortal, living organism first in order to experience these things?"

Another question arises in the process: "...'intelligent' according to whose definition? Humans'?"

"If yes, perhaps according to average humans? What's an average human? Does an average human speak English? Is an average human from a technologically advanced country?" and so on.

"How similar to a human must the artificial intelligence be in order to satisfy the notion of strong AI?"

"If it is not similar to a human, can it fulfill our notion of strong AI? For example, could it run for public office and engender enough empathy from human voters to defeat a human candidate, when it doesn't know what it's like to be a human in so many ways?"

"For example, if it doesn't know what it's like to smell what humans can smell, or what it's like to feel pain like humans do, much less what it's like to, say, raise a child, it will never understand huge sections of poetry and art; its bonding and conversing with humans in person will be sub-par, and it will alienate us, surely if we expect a leader to nurture subordinates and voting constituents."

This wikipedia list I propose will also go into what progress in the field of artificial intelligence has been made in each item in the list -- and future directions.

I do not know where in the large wikipedia universe the list should be started, but I would like it to be in wikipedia proper, as opposed to wikibooks or wikiProjects, for example. I tried to figure out where, but I am completely new to contributing to wikipedia, and wikipedia is still not user-friendly enough for beginning contributors, and is divided into so many parts that are similar in content and purpose to one another.

I am almost certain that this message has to be forwarded to a specialist at wikipedia knowledgeable in artificial intelligence enough to grasp the virtues of the wikipedia list I am proposing, please.

---

I received a reply:

This is a content issue that is beyond the scope of this service, however that portal has an associated "Talk" page where you can add this suggestion.

So now I have to re-ask them to forward it to the appropriate content moderator.

Yes, my email got carried away, but I do think the list will be useful to anyone who believes that strong artificial intelligence is possible, especially those who believe it will occur within decades.

The entry could be titled the way I wrote it up top, or "Future limitations/problems of AI." That section "Major Problems of AI" exists, but the links in it don't suffice.

Also, the list will be of use to science fiction writers.

I will try to start the list, but I have never created an entry in wikipedia -- this talk is the first time I've "contributed."

If anyone else wants to and knows how, etc., that'd be great.

-Nicholas Nn9888 (talk) 08:29, 16 July 2015 (UTC) Nn9888 (talk) 07:59, 12 July 2015 (UTC)


 * The major issue I see here is that a fundamental Wikipedia policy requires that all material needs to be based on reputable published sources. Wikipedia can't be used as a vehicle for original thought.  If it is possible to reference all the material in the article you have in mind -- including the basic organizational scheme -- to reputable published sources, then the idea might be viable.  Best regards, Looie496 (talk) 12:07, 16 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Well put, and I can shed some light on the two different varieties of information that have to be sourced here. For each task that AI research has attempted to tackle (or hopes to) there are voluminous sources which can speak to the difficulties if engineering that particular faculty.  So original research wouldn't necessarily be a problem in that regard.  What is a problem to demonstrate without dipping into WP:SYNTH territory is the supporting framework here of an hierarchy of human abilities that are quantifiably more difficult than others.  When talking about topics such as cognition and the very notion of subjectivity itself, things which have been notoriously hard to pin down empirically in both the thousands of years of philosophy of mind and contemporary cognitive science alike, it becomes very tricky to course hard claims on what might be achieved and what qualifies as successful reproduction of a given mental feature, in part or in whole.


 * That long caveat done though, I'm not sure I'd dismiss Nn9888's suggestion. There might be room for such an article here, though some of the content may end up represented overlap of existing articles that borders on redundancy.  One way to proceed would be to create a section on "longstanding challenges in AI research" in the main Artificial intelligence article, keep adding to it and then spin it out when it gets large enough.  I don't know it's a complex issue (both the topic itself and the best way to approach it in terms of policy, organization, and informative encyclopedic tone.  There would be significant issues with verifiability and weight in naming the article anything close to "future limitations with AI", since there no one are of human ability for which there exists overwhelming scientific consensus amongst AI researchers/cognitive scientists that a machine could never master replicate it. But I'll give the general notion some thought, see if I can't contribute clearer thoughts on how to approach the idea.


 * If we did proceed, I'd be happy to contribute content to the sections on perception, spatial/motor function, emotion, memory, natural language capacity, consciousness/general cognition, and modularity; I'm better versed in some of those areas than others, but know enough about how each works with regard to human capabilities to contextualize the complexities in engineering them in a machine. The real problem will be sourcing and attributing said research.  That will be a simply massive undertaking.  S n o w  let's rap 13:57, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 5
Newsletter • October 2015

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

We did it!

In July, we launched five pilot WikiProjects: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. We also use the new design, named "WPX UI," on WikiProject Women in Technology, Women in Red, WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health. We are currently looking for projects for the next round of testing. If you are interested, please sign up on the Pilots page.

Shortly after our launch we presented at Wikimania 2015. Our slides are on Wikimedia Commons.

Then after all that work, we went through the process of figuring out whether we accomplished our goal. We reached out to participants on the redesigned WikiProjects, and we asked them to complete a survey. (If you filled out your survey—thank you!) While there are still some issues with the WikiProject tools and the new design, there appears to be general satisfaction (at least among those who responded). The results of the survey and more are documented in our grant report filed with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work continues!

There is more work that needs to be done, so we have applied for a renewal of our grant. Comments on the proposal are welcome. We would like to improve what we have already started on the English Wikipedia and to also expand to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Why those? Because they are multilingual projects and because there needs to be better coordination across Wikimedia projects. More details are available in the renewal proposal.

How can the Wikimedia Foundation support WikiProjects?

The Wikimedia Developer Summit will be held in San Francisco in January 2016. The recently established Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation is interested in investigating what technical support they can provide for WikiProjects, i.e., support beyond just templates and bots. I have plenty of opinions myself, but I want to hear what you think. The session is being planned on Phabricator, the Wikimedia bug tracker. If you are not familiar with Phabricator, you can log in with your Wikipedia username and password through the "Login or Register: MediaWiki" button on the login page. Your feedback can help make editing Wikipedia a better experience.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 09:03, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Structural information theory
There has been clear COI on Structural information theory. See Talk:Structural_information_theory and this AFD which is related to some of the content written into the article. If we can't get someone knowledgeable to review it, I fear the article may need to be reverted to an 8 year old stub version. Alsee (talk) 17:18, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Expert attention
I was wondering if your group could help with Corporate Brain and the discussion now underway at Articles for deletion/Corporate Brain. thx, Shawn in Montreal (talk) 00:20, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 6
Newsletter • January 2016

Hello there! Happy to be writing this newsletter once more. This month:

What comes next

Some good news: the Wikimedia Foundation has renewed WikiProject X. This means we can continue focusing on making WikiProjects better.

During our first round of work, we created a prototype WikiProject based on two ideas: (1) WikiProjects should clearly present things for people to do, and (2) The content of WikiProjects should be automated as much as possible. We launched pilots, and for the most part it works. But this approach will not work for the long term. While it makes certain aspects of running a WikiProject easier, it makes the maintenance aspects harder.

We are working on a major overhaul that will address these issues. New features will include:
 * Creating WikiProjects by simply filling out a form, choosing which reports you want to generate for your project. This will work with existing bots in addition to the Reports Bot reports. (Of course, you can also have sections curated by humans.)
 * One-click button to join a WikiProject, with optional notifications.
 * Be able to define your WikiProject's scope within the WikiProject itself by listing relevant pages and categories, eliminating the need to tag every talk page with a banner. (You will still be allowed to do that, of course. It just won't be required.)

The end goal is a collaboration tool that can be used by WikiProjects but also by any edit-a-thon or group of people that want to coordinate on improving articles. Though implemented as an extension, the underlying content will be wikitext, meaning that you can continue to use categories, templates, and other features as you normally would.

This will take a lot of work, and we are just getting started. What would you like to see? I invite you to discuss on our talk page.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 7
Newsletter • February 2016

This month:

One database for Wikipedia requests

Development of the extension for setting up WikiProjects, as described in the last issue of this newsletter, is currently underway. No terribly exciting news on this front.

In the meantime, we are working on a prototype for a new service we hope to announce soon. The problem: there are requests scattered all across Wikipedia, including requests for new articles and requests for improvements to existing articles. We Wikipedians are very good at coming up with lists of things to do. But once we write these lists, where do they end up? How can we make them useful for all editors—even those who do not browse the missing articles lists, or the particular WikiProjects that have lists?

Introducing Wikipedia Requests, a new tool to centralize the various lists of requests around Wikipedia. Requests will be tagged by category and WikiProject, making it easier to find requests based on what your interests are. Accompanying this service will be a bot that will let you generate reports from this database on any wiki page, including WikiProjects. This means that once a request is filed centrally, it can syndicated all throughout Wikipedia, and once it is fulfilled, it will be marked as "complete" throughout Wikipedia. The idea for this service came about when I saw that it was easy to put together to-do lists based on database queries, but it was harder to do this for human-generated requests when those requests are scattered throughout the wiki, siloed throughout several pages. This should especially be useful for WikiProjects that have overlapping interests.

The newsletter this month is fairly brief; not a lot of news, just checking in to say that we are hard at work and hope to have more for you soon.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:44, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 8
Newsletter • March / April 2016

This month:

Transclude article requests anywhere on Wikipedia

In the last issue of the WikiProject X Newsletter, I discussed the upcoming Wikipedia Requests system: a central database for outstanding work on Wikipedia. I am pleased to announce Wikipedia Requests is live! Its purpose is to supplement automatically generated lists, such as those from SuggestBot, Reports bot, or Wikidata. It is currently being demonstrated on WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health (which I work on as part of my NIOSH duties) and WikiProject Women scientists.

Adding a request is as simple as filling out a form. Just go to the Add form to add your request. Adding sources will help ensure that your request is fulfilled more quickly. And when a request is fulfilled, simply click "mark as complete" and it will be removed from all the lists it's on. All at the click of a button! (If anyone is concerned, all actions are logged.)

With this new service is a template to transclude these requests: Wikipedia Requests. It's simple to use: add the template to a page, specifying,  , or  , and the list will be transcluded. For example, for requests having to do with all living people, just do. Use these lists on WikiProjects but also for edit-a-thons where you want a convenient list of things to do on hand. Give it a shot!

Help us build our list!

The value of Wikipedia Requests comes from being a centralized database. The long work to migrating individual lists into this combined list is slowly underway. As of writing, we have 883 open tasks logged in Wikipedia Requests. We need your help building this list.

If you know of a list of missing articles, or of outstanding tasks for existing articles, that you would like to migrate to this new system, head on over to Wikipedia Requests and help out. Doing this will help put your list in front of more eyes—more than just your own WikiProject.

An open database means new tools

WikiProject X maintains a database that associates article talk pages (and draft talk pages) with WikiProjects. This database powers many of the reports that Reports bot generates. However, until very recently, this database was not made available to others who might find its data useful. It's only common sense to open up the database and let others build tools with it.

And indeed: Citation Hunt, the game to add citations to Wikipedia, now lets you filter by WikiProject, using the data from our database.

Are you a tool developer interested in using this? Here are some details: the database resides on Tool Labs with the name. The table that associates WikiProjects with articles and drafts is called. Pages are stored by talk page title but in the future this should change. Have fun!

On the horizon


 * The work on the CollaborationKit extension continues. The extension will initially focus on reducing template and Lua bloat on WikiProjects (especially our WPX UI demonstration projects), and will from there create custom interfaces for creating and maintaining WikiProjects.
 * The WikiCite meeting will be in Berlin in May. The goal of the meeting is to figure out how to build a bibliographic database for use on the Wikimedia projects. This fits in quite nicely with WikiProject X's work: we want to make it easier for people to find things to work on, and with a powerful, open bibliographic database, we can build recommendations for sources. This feature was requested by the Wikipedia Library back in September, and this meeting is a major next step. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this meeting.

Until next time,

Harej (talk) 01:29, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 9
Newsletter • May / June 2016

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, featuring the first screenshot of our new CollaborationKit software!

Harej (talk) 00:23, 25 June 2016 (UTC)

Opinions Requested Regarding Possible Fringe Article
A discussion has been opened on the wp:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard concerning an article that may be promoting pseudo-scientific claims. Opinions from knowledgeable editors are kindly requested at the discussion - Nabla (talk) 10:09, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
 * FYI: The thread in question is Fringe theories/Noticeboard. (Nabla's pointer didn't work for me when I clicked it, perhaps because of the umlaut or the pipe). Cnilep (talk) 01:01, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 10
Issue 10 of the WikiProject X newsletter is here!

This month, we discuss the new CollaborationKit extension. Here's an image as a teaser:



23:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 11
Newsletter • February 2018

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, with plans to renew work with a followup grant proposal to support finalising the deployment of CollaborationKit!

-— Isarra ༆ 21:26, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Visual Antipriming
Input invited about this draft. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:30, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 12
Newsletter • August 2018

This month: WikiProject X: The resumption

Work has resumed on WikiProject X and CollaborationKit, backed by a successfully funded Project Grant. For more information on the current status and planned work, please see this month's issue of the newsletter!

-— Isarra ༆ 22:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 13
Newsletter • December 2018

This month: A general update.

The current status of the project is as follows:
 * Progress of the project has been generally delayed since September due to development issues (more bitrot than expected, some of the code just being genuinely confusing, etc) and personal injury (I suffered a concussion in October and was out of commission for almost two months as a result).
 * I currently expect to be putting out a proper call for CollaborationKit pilots in January/February, with estimated deployment in February/March if things don't go horribly wrong (they will, though, don't worry). As a part of that, I will properly update the page and send out announcement and reach out to all projects already signed up as pilots for WikiProject X in general, at which point those (still) interested can volunteer specifically to test the CollaborationKit extension.
 * WikiProject X/Pilots was originally created for the first WikiProject X prototype, and given this is where the project has since gone, it's only logical to continue to use it. While I haven't yet updated the page to properly reflect this:
 * If you want to add your project to this page now, feel free. Just bear in mind that more information what to actually expect will be added later/included in the announcement, because by then I will have a much better idea myself.
 * Until then, you can find me in my corner working on making the CollaborationKit code do what we want and not just what we told it, per the workboard.

Until next time,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:44, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

A new newsletter directory is out!
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
 * – Sent on behalf of Headbomb. 03:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 14
Newsletter • June 2019

Updates: I've been focusing largely on the development side of things, so we are a lot closer now to being ready to actually start discussing deploying it and testing it out here.

There's just a few things left that need to be resolved:
 * A bunch of language support issues in particular, plus some other release blockers, such as the fact that currently there's no good way to find any hubs people do create.
 * We also probably need some proper documentation and examples up to even reference if we want a meaningful discussion. We have the extension documentation and some test projects, but we probably need a bit more. Also I need to be able to even find the test projects! How can I possibly write reports about this stuff if I can't find any of it?!

Some other stuff that's happened in the meantime:
 * Midpoint report is out for this round of the project, if you want to read in too much detail about all the problems I've been running into.
 * WikiProject Molecular Biology have successfully set up using the old module system that CollaborationKit is intended to replace (eventually), and it even seems to work, so go them. Based on the issues they ran into, it looks like the members signup thing on that system has some of the same problems as we've been unable to resolve in CK, though, which is... interesting. (Need to change the content model to the right thing for the formwizard config to take. Ugh, content models.)

Until next time,

-— Isarra ༆ 21:43, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 15
Newsletter • September 2019

A final update, for now:

The third grant-funded round of WikiProject X has been completed. Unfortunately, while this round has not resulted in a deployed product, I am not planning to resume working on the project for the foreseeable future. Please see the final report for more information.

Regards,

-— Isarra ༆ 19:24, 29 September 2019 (UTC)

Request for information on WP1.0 web tool
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

User script to detect unreliable sources
I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like and turns it into something like
 * John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.
 * John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.

It will work on a variety of links, including those from cite web, cite journal and doi.

The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.

Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.

- &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b}

This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:01, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

FAR for Hilary Putnam
I have nominated Hilary Putnam for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:17, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Information processing (psychology)
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Information processing (psychology) that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 19:12, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

FAC of Knowledge
Hello, I wanted to let you know that I have nominated the article Knowledge for FA status. The nomination page can be found at Featured article candidates/Knowledge/archive1. If you have the time, I would appreciate your comments. For a short FAQ of the FA reviewing process, see Wikipedia Signpost/2008-04-07/Dispatches. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:59, 27 February 2024 (UTC)