Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing/Members

Page Maintenance - Highlighting Active & Inactive Users
This page of Project Computing participants seems to have become somewhat untidy so I've taken the opportunity, after joining the group myself, to tidy things up a bit so that membership of the Project Computing team is made clearer and joining instructions are made more visible.

I note that other similar groups have divided their participant lists into "active" and "inactive" or "past" members and wonder whether other editors feel that this would be a useful approach for this Project? My reasons are not to try to exclude anyone from membership of the Project but rather to help to create a sense of community - which seems to be one of the basic principles of the WikiProject concept. It is to be hoped that this will not create a negative impression of those users who may have been very active users and made major contributions to Project Computing in the past but who are not currently active.

Having done a bit of research largely via the pages of other WikiProjects, I propose the following as the first few steps in this direction:


 * 1) Assess the level of activity of participants in editing pages in the recent past
 * 2) Work out a reasonable date to define a level of editing that can be used to define "active"
 * 3) Divide the participant list into "active" or "inactive" users
 * 4) Place the participant list within a simple table and create a column to indicate "active" or "inactive" status
 * 5) Update the activity status column in the table using data from step 3
 * 6) Edit the participant page to invite users to change their own status from "active" to "inactive" or vice versa if they feel so inclined
 * 7) After a settling in period of say one week, to divide the table between two sections - one for active and one for inactive users.

I've used WikiDashboard to check the time-stamp of the most recent edit by users on the participant list - this does not show that the user edited pages in Project Computing but at least shows those users who have not been active at all recently. An analysis of the results shows that out of a total of 213 participants as at 14 November, around 70 have edited something/somewhere within the past 2 weeks, and around 100 users in total have edited something/somewhere in the past 6 weeks. Extending the limit to 3 months (as is done in other projects) raises the total of "active users" to around 115. This seems to me to be a reasonable level at which to start to define users as "active" but as indicated above individual users will of course be free to declare themselves as active in any case.

If anyone can advise me how to limit this analysis to just Project Computing pages then please do so and I'll see how this compares. I'd also welcome advice as to how to automate what is at the moment a somewhat tedious and largely manual process.

Please feel free to comment on these proposals, or if there is already a more suitable forum where they might usefully be discussed please advise accordingly.

Inspeximus (talk) 17:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I have nothing against "tidiness" in this respect. However, I feel if such a measure were adopted, it would be important to send those who are in line for becoming classified as "inactive" some kind of e-mail notice that this action will occur in, say, two weeks time. This would both give the member a chance to sign in and "save" him/herself as well as perhaps rekindle an interest that had been forgotten about. Everyone is different in the manner they choose to contribute. We each have a unique perspective and totally different areas of expertise. I'm sure some contributors are pretty much "addicted" to signing in daily to fiddle with this and that. Some people are by nature life-long career Hall Monitors who insist on controlling everything and everyone. Others join to make an unfrequent correction, update or comment only when they happen upon false, outdated or missing information on a page they navigated to in the course of researching something. Should the contributions of such people be considered any less valuable for the continual betterment of this great resource? Mykstor (talk) 21:11, 23 October 2011 (UTC)mykstorMykstor (talk) 21:11, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

active users?
Hi all,

I've recently checked into the list of WikiProject Computing/Members.

Could this list be improved by stating which members are currently active or inactive or haven't made a contribution in quite some time.

FockeWulf FW 190 (talk) 19:31, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Bold change of the member list
I made a bold edit of the very outdates member page. The old page is archived here. Reason is that the old list was unusable since completely outdated and this talk page already asked 10(!) years prior to solve this issue. I decided to remove every person which hasn't added themselves within the last two years, assuming at least those few users are still active. Originally I wanted to do the opposite approach to just remove everyone which haven't been editing Wikipedia within the last two years. But this would have been more work than it have been worth it. Also this wouldn't have meant those people are actually active on WikiProject Computing. So the remove everything and keep some is the more sensible solution. Everyone being still active on Wikiproject Computing but added themselves before 2021 are kindly invited to add themselves again. This has the upside that those who care and being active and easily add themselves again while having cleanly removed everyone who aren't active enough to qualify for being on this list anyway. If someone opposes this step I would love to hear the reasons pro & contra as reply here. Please refrain from reverting this edit without prior discussion. GavriilaDmitriev (talk) 07:35, 22 February 2022 (UTC)


 * I think it was a good thing to do. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 02:18, 24 February 2022 (UTC)