Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/January 2011

why work on the backlog?
Do we really want to respond to articles that have templates on them (some a year old)? Often the articles are abondoned or are severely lacking content (and that being the bigger issue than prose). I copyedited one "backlog article" last month and it was miserable. I felt like I was washing and polishing a car that had no engine, and hadn't had one for a year. Then I ce-ed a requested article and it was night and day. Sure, it was a huge amount of work to rewrite the article, but it was a very worthy topic and FULL of content and got a GA and will probably get an FA.

I guess everyone can do what they want to do. And if people like "working on the backlog" or like working on "articles someone else stuck a template on, rather than ce-ing themselves". Well, not for me to hold anyone back from that fun.

I just wonder if "the Guild" ought to direct its resources elsewhere. There is a huge amount of wikipedia to work on. Why not prioritize our efforts? Go after articles that are high hit, or that people care about, or take requests only and just get 100% out of the "tag cleanup business", but still help the encyclopedia and serve as a center for people who want to copyedit. I think it would do more good and be more fun.TCO (talk) 06:42, 31 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Feel free to pursue copy editing goals in whatever way you choose. The initial drive almost entirely eliminated the requested copy edit backlog, which was, I believe, around fifty articles at that time.  The progress made on the tag backlog over the previous four drives is impressive though, almost three thousand net backlog reduction, and sometimes chasing down all these little articles can lead to other general clean up, such as when articles should be deleted or merged.  It all ends up improving the encyclopedia, which is the final goal anyway. —Torchiest talk/edits 07:04, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Copy editing articles from the backlog is like washing cars that are on display at a car dealership. It has to be done, and some of the cars (or articles) will not be sold (or viewed). However, it makes the dealership (or Wikipedia) look a lot cleaner and better. The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 13:35, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm a modified TCO-er on this. I've had my fill of deadwood, but the more recent months list articles that merit the effort. I did Active Directory from December 2010 to get warmed up for next month, and felt like my time was well spent. Yes, making minor improvements on trivial articles is "good", but doing work that has greater bang for the buck (more readers/interest) is better for your mental health and for WP, too. Not to mention that if we flushed January 2011 every day, we'd impress the whole community. Dirty secret: the ancient backlog exists because nobody cared about those topics enough to put their time into fixing them—for years! Lfstevens (talk) 02:43, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The Guild works in several areas. One of these is to look after articles marked with the copyedit tag. If you work in the copy editing department of a newspaper or magazine, you cannot say, hey, let's just work on the features and forget about all the small items as they are of lower importance. We will only work on those articles that are considered our very best – those that may even win us awards. Ultimately, the publication will be judged as a whole. The same applies to an encyclopedia. If your interest lies in FAs and GAs, then by all means help on the Requests page. But as a Guild, we need to address all those other small articles that no one has cared for in the past. The good news is that we have made great progress. If we can match our progress in 2010, hopefully, by the end of the year, the backlog will be very small. Then, we will have more time to dedicate to making good articles even better. The nice thing about the Guild is that you can choose what you want to work on. Ultimately, we aim to make things more readable, GA/FA or not. – SMasters (talk) 02:58, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not ignoring the "small articles". It's doing the important things first, and hitting the smalls after the bigs are done. There's no way that a newspaper that was putting out a major expose would say, "forget the expose. we've got a bunch of articles about people's pets that have been in the queue longer that need our attention." Lfstevens (talk) 11:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Most of the "big ones" are well looked after. If they need help from us, they go to our Requests page. The drive is to serve the other small articles that not many people are looking after, but it's a job that stil has to be done. My point about the newspaper is that ALL articles will be copy edited. That is what the drive is trying to achieve eventually. – SMasters (talk) 04:33, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

It's not FAs or GAs. REally some of those are on really trivial topics. Who wants a stunning article on your sock drawer? That's just a writing exercise. No one will read it. To me the thing is high hit count. Those are the articles to improve. The ones with the highest hit count and the worst prose. Maybe another factor would be most content, versus bad prose. It is frustrating to rewrite something where you can just see gaps in the content as well. Easier if it is all there, at least, even if the writing is miserable. Not a sermon, just a thought. P.s. I signed up for the drive. P.s.s. I'm kinda antitagger too.TCO (talk) 03:09, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You are right about budgeting our time; the most valuable resource we have is our editor's time. This is one reason why we have backlog elimination drives every second month. We can work on some of the smaller, unimportant, or less important articles every second month, and the larger, more important, and high-traffic articles the alternate months. If we do the important things first, the less important tasks will never get done, as the maintenance backlogs are so huge. So we are trying to strike a balance. -- Diannaa (Talk) 17:54, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Now I'm really disagreeing. Whenever you have a choice between doing a more important task and a less important task, it only makes sense to do the more important task first. If you have enough resource to do everything, then you'll finish everything, and you'd rather have the more important ones done sooner. If you don't have enough resource, then you'd rather leave a less important task undone than a more important one. Isn't this common sense? Lfstevens (talk) 22:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Not always. It's really up to the discretion of the editor of what is "important" or not.  While we could come up with some arbitrary criteria for what constitutes the most "important" article in the to-do pile, we'll always have disagreements over the importance of the lesser-known articles.  Perhaps the reason those articles have low hit counts (or lower, as the case may be), is that the prose or styling of the article itself is a hindrance to its readability to the point that readers go elsewhere for their information.


 * At some point, we do need to acknowledge that there are some less-visible articles which do deserve attention, if only for the fact that they haven't had any. The existence of such an article on Wikipedia generally, but not always, indicates that the subject matter is of importance to someone.  While a good deal of time needs to be spent on articles with high visibility, we do need to at least spend some time going over the list of mid to low-importance articles and attempting to get some of them out of the backlog.  For all we know, the only think preventing them from reaching GA is a lack of editors willing to take the plunge and (effectively) rewrite an article or two to make it easy to contribute. Webmaster961 (talk) 02:20, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree that we shouldn't try to define "important" for the guild. I think we're effectively using FIFO to do that now. I trust the members to decide that for themselves. Lfstevens (talk) 04:25, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

word counts
I'm not sure how to get the word counts of the articles I'm copy editing. Could someone tell me? Spock of Vulcan (talk) 21:22, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I remember setting up the addon, but I can't explain it to you without the help of WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives because in that section is exactly how to set up the thing. Hope this helps. fds  Talk 23:44, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's very helpful. I hadn't seen that page. Spock of Vulcan (talk) 00:05, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Word count discrepancy
I'm about to start editing a very large article, Greyhawk. When I ran the word count, it came up with 9532 words. However, there are large sections of text that are readable prose, but are in bullet lists; thus, they are not being counted. I removed the bullets and ran it again, and the word count was 11706, which is the number I'm going to use for my tally. I can't remember how this was handled in the past, but I believe we had some kind of procedure or protocol for it. If there's another, preferred way to handle word count issues like this, please let me know. Thanks. —Torchiest talkedits 21:45, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That is a good way. Other people have been copying the content into Microsoft Word, as it includes the bulleted lists, and has a word-count feature. -- Diannaa (Talk) 23:43, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, I plugged it into Word, and it returned 12478 after I removed section headings and other garbage. I'm using that as my word count number. —Torchiest talkedits 23:19, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

MoS for capitalisation of political titles
Hi all

Small problem with capitalisation of things such as "Cabinet Minister". Should it be capitalised or not ?


 * "was a cabinet minister from" - I am supposing non capitals
 * "was made Cabinet Minister for Trade" - I am leaning towards capitals, but still unsure

I cannot find anything, so far, in the MoS guides such as Manual of Style (titles), Manual_of_Style_(proper_names) or Manual of Style (text formatting) nor in archive searches.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Chaosdruid (talk) 17:00, 27 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I would think the generic term would not be capitalized, but if it is a specific office, then yes capitalize it. So your guesses were correct. :) —Torchiest talkedits 23:24, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
 * In case you're still curious, here's the spot in the MOS where this is discussed: WP:Job titles.
 * The MOS link above is pretty clear for this case. Where the MOS isn't clear, one can fall back on generally accepted practices, such as those documented in The Chicago Manual of Style.  While that won't prevent someone from arguing about it, it will at least give you something to stand on.
 * CMoS 16th Ed. covers this topic in sections 8.18 to 8.32. Summarizing, the general rule is that titles and offices are capitalized when they immediately precede a personal name and are used as part of that name, although there are exceptions for titles after the name in promotional or ceremonial contexts. A title on its own is capitalized when in a context such as a toast, formal introduction, or direct address. (When the title is standing in place of a personal name to identify a particular officeholder, that would be direct address.)  Titles given in apposition before a name (usually preceded by the or a modifier) are not capitalized: "the empress Elizabeth of Austria" (but "Empress Elizabeth of Austria"), "former president Carter".  Political, military, quasi-miltary, and religious titles are capitalized only when used as part of the name, regardless of the wishes of the title holder.  Corporate and organizational titles are rarely used as part of a name, and thus are lower-cased. Descriptive titles are lowercased ("the historian William McNeill").  Civic and academic honors are capitalized when following a personal name: "Laurence L. Bongie, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada" but "the fellows".
 * Of course, different conventions may apply for articles written in dialects of English other than American English, but none occur to me immediately... // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 21:59, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Bold type
✅

Hi all

Next problem, bold typeface !

I have been editing a few of the manga and anime articles over the last few drives and after reading the MoS Manual_of_Style_(text_formatting) I have been "deboldening" text such as this:

Puncher (パンチャー) (Jikuu Senshi Spielban)

There were two reasons for me deboldening it, one was that the template page Template:Nihongo showed that the type should automatically appear in bold and did not have the ' ' '. The second was the MoS.

To check I was right I thought I would go and check out a few other pages. Imagine my surprise when I went to 'Allo 'Allo and found those character lists in bold too!

Any ideas ? Chaosdruid (talk) 18:59, 29 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I have an answer from the TV project Character names in bold type - It looks like I was right to debolden them - Phew! it would have been a lot of work to put them back in :¬)
 * Chaosdruid (talk) 20:38, 29 January 2011 (UTC)