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

Drive invitation
I have written a draft of an invitation for this drive here. Any help in developing it further would be appreciated. Thanks, The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 17:21, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I hav e checked it over and the copy seems good :) I will wrap it in our signature blue for you. --Dianna (talk) 00:51, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Peter Kirillovich Essen
Looking at the earliest entries, I have been examining Peter Kirillovich Essen. I added a source to the talk page. The grammar is wanting. I do have a general question. Some of his ranks are shown with capital letters, "Captain" for example, but many of them are not. Which way should they all be? I think capitalized, but I suppose there is a standard somewhere. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:04, 29 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The standard is found at WP:MilTerms. So, in the list for example, "Captain" would not be capitalized. If it was before his name or referring to him as "the Captain", then it would be capitalized.--Slon02 (talk) 22:21, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the information. The article says, "In 1796 he was promoted to colonel and in 1798 was promoted to Major-General, and became head of the Vyborg musketeer regiment. He was promoted to lieutenant general in 1800."  By the standard, this should say "major general" without caps. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:26, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * In the previous sentence it says he was promoted to lieutenant in 1796. From lieutenant to colonel in the same year? Wow! This surely needs a citation (Actually the whole "Career" section does.) --Stfg (talk) 13:33, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Dthomsen8. I will check it over and make the correction. --Dianna (talk) 16:08, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

rollover words
Do I include them in the total words field? Thanks :Jay8g Hi!- I am... -What I do... WASH- BRIDGE- WPWA - MFIC- WPIM 02:17, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * No, we calculate a combination of your total words copy edited and your rollover words. The total words copy edited and the rollover words should be separate. The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 02:20, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I did not work on the September drive, but I did work on the July drive. Do I have rollover words from the July drive? --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:23, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * No, the rollover words only carry over from consecutive drives. The intention is to encourage people to participate in all the drives. --Dianna (talk) 16:09, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Incomprehensible article
I have just copyedited Sunan Kalijaga Islamic University. That is to say I have copyedited some of it and removed the rest as being incomprehensible. Having looked at the University website, and tried to translate some sections with "Google translate", I can see where the text came from (copyright violation?). On the article's talk page, MathMaven, in January 2011, thought it inappropriate to copyedit the sections that I removed. Rather than leave the copyedit tag on indefinitely, I reduced the article in length. Any comments? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:46, 5 November 2011 (UTC)
 * That looks fine, if there are interested editors they can always restructure the material and provide references. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:18, 6 November 2011 (UTC)
 * If it's copyvio that should go, it may be better to delete it completely rather than just comment it out. If underneath the grotty writing there's some useful content, another option is to keep it but place Rough translation or Rough translation-section. --Stfg (talk) 17:09, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I just found Ōkunitama Shrine (tagged since April 2010). It is also tagged Cleanup-translation and, frankly, it's not worth while, or probably even feasible, to copy edit such an article. So I just removed the copy edit tag. Have I sinned against the "no rubber stamping" rule? I hope not, because, with so much good stuff to work on, any time spent on an article that needs retranslating anyway seems pretty much like time wasted. --Stfg (talk) 14:01, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * You're fine. The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 14:10, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

List of 2010 article sizes before drive started
Before the November backlog drive started, I created a draft essay listing all the older article sizes. As could be expected, most of the articles left from April, May, June and July 2010 were fairly large (10kb-55kb), and most tedious to copyedit (few "4-paragraph" 3kb articles were left for those months). I am typically making about 200 small changes to each article, including the addition of some clarifying text or a source footnote. Here is the essay listing those articles:
 * WP:2010 articles which needed copyedit

That essay listed the articles as of October 2011 (many of which are fixed now). Those articles can be reviewed from that list, in the rare case where some articles were untagged without fully correcting all text.

For editors who want smaller articles, I suggest editing some smaller newly-tagged articles from 2011 (September or October), rather than give up in frustration, due to large, time-consuming articles left from early 2010. It would be great if everyone could copyedit the older articles, but I don't want people to be utterly overwhelmed by large old articles needing perhaps 2 hours each to fully edit. The good news is that most gargantuan, or hugely mangled, articles were finished earlier this year (except perhaps some cities in India). -Wikid77 (talk) 18:16, 6 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Having recently edited several large articles that took far more than 2 hours, I think it doesn't make sense to set editors' expectations that most are easy. Lots of low-hanging fruit was picked in prior drives. Play it as it lays. Lfstevens (talk) 08:55, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Trolleybus#Recent power developments
The Trolleybus section is tagged for copy edit, but I do not see anything to be done. I am quite familiar with Trollybus operations, and the article seems well done and accurate to me. I suggest removing the tag without taking credit for copy editing in the drive. --DThomsen8 (talk) 22:10, 7 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with checking the other article sections, in case the wrong section was tagged for copyedit. In articles where I find other sections also need work (beyond the tagged sections), then I copyedit the whole page and count all the words (as the work of proofreading all those words). In cases where the article seems doomed to deletion, then I copyedit just the minimum grammar, and retag the article, such as {&#123;Notability|date=November 2011}}, rather than waste time as I did in September by rewriting a tedious vanity page which was deleted after hours of copy-editing and investigation of bot-polished images which made the article seem to be illustrated by art experts, rather than a bot putting fancy descriptions on bulk-loaded images in Wikimedia Commons. Any logical actions to shorten the tedious copy-editing should be used, such as retag German text as {&#123;rough translation|German Wikipedia}}. We can all fix more articles, if we work smarter rather than just harder. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:29, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I removed the tag, and I take no credit for copy editing. Yes, we must work smarter if we are ever to get the copy edit list down to a reasonable size. --DThomsen8 (talk) 15:29, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

What to do with a case like this?
Port City Cricket League 2010 is about a cricket league that has presumably been played by now, but it is written as an announcement: where it will be played, which teams will take part, fixture dates. So it's out of date, and is WP the place for announcements of this kind anyway? (WP:NOT doesn't appear to help.) What would be a good way to handle this kind of thing? --Stfg (talk) 14:33, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The tense of the article will need to be changed, and it appears as though some tone changes are in order, as well. My major concern with this is that the article contains no sources, and has been this way since its creation in March 2010. Perhaps do a reference search as well? The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 14:51, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Just did a quick ref search myself; there are a couple Blogspot posts and a Facebook page, but those sites aren't usually considered reliable. Perhaps an AfD would be best in this situation if no sources can be found? The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 14:54, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much, Utahraptor. I looked for some sources today too and came up with much the same (including zilch in Google news archive). However, one of our colleagues (User:Vibhijain) has done a rather good job on it today, editing the text and tagging the results table as out of date. Not to waste his work, I'm inclined to leave it now and see if someone comes up with something for the results table. I think the subject is quite notable, so AfD may not be the ideal course anyway. Reasonable? Cheers, --Stfg (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

My first copyedit
If no one minds, I'd appreciate some feedback about my first major copyedit: [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Significand&diff=prev&oldid=460033896]. Thanks! -- N Y  Kevin  @965, i.e. 22:10, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * In many articles, it is good to add some more words to clarify overly-terse phrases, but removing words is dangerous, especially in science and math articles. In that article "Significand", about the string of numeric digits excluding the exponent, there are special considerations, such as binary numbers versus base-10 numbers, and the formal definitions set by the IEEE. When removing words about those special issues, then the resulting text might no longer be correct. For that reason, I start adjusting text by just inserting commas, to see if that would clarify long technical phrases, but if the text says "floating-point types" or "IEEE" then those are precise computer terms which should only be carefully reworded. Hope that clarifies when to avoid removing words. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:05, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

No more word count for sections
I was able to use the prose-size tool for sections until recently (by clicking on "Page size" in edit-preview mode), but that no longer works (although it still works for entire articles). I recently added a duplicate-links tool to my .js page, but now I can't delete it to see if one may be interfering with the other. The same problem exists in Firefox and Chrome so I don't think it's a browser issue, and it's time-consuming to copyedit a long article when only a single section is tagged. Anyone else having a similar problem?--Miniapolis (talk) 03:00, 13 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not working for me at all; in fact, the link isn't in my toolbox anymore. I suggest using Microsoft Word or a similar program to determine word count. The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 22:23, 13 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I use the NoteTab text editor to count words, using the menu option  with the regular expression set to: .?[ =\|\/\n] where the dot "." means any character, the questmark "?" means repeat until the range "[ ]" of space/=/bar/slash or newline. I am including the bar "|" and equals-sign "=" as words in infoboxes, because the meaning of the parameters will change if bar/= are omitted from infoboxes (or other templates), whereas commas are not counted (as separate words) because they rarely change the meaning. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:05, 19 November 2011 (UTC)


 * When Mediawiki 1.18 was deployed, the tool had some problems for a while (as did many others). At first it gave only zero counts. Then it did, but clicking it a second time didn't remove its stuff. It's working well for me again now, including the edit-preview trick for sections. Reinstall, maybe? --Stfg (talk) 10:55, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

Long, low-word-count articles
I don't know the consensus for dealing with list-type articles during the backlog-reduction drives; these can be humongous but have a low word count, and I've noticed these articles tend to be the last to go in a backlog. Should we copyedit only the non-list portion (with a word count if any, assuming the list portion isn't too hideous), or do the whole thing with a word count from Word? There's a disincentive to tackle these articles if we can't use a realistic word count.--Miniapolis (talk) 18:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The general rule for getting a word count from a large article with a large list is to remove the asterisks and/or other wiki syntax from the article and getting the word count that way. Please remember to get the word count this way by clicking "Show Preview" rather than "Save Page". Regards, The Utahraptor Talk/Contribs 19:15, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks!--Miniapolis (talk) 03:27, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Forgive me, but that's a very cumbersome and error-prone way to do it. The FAQ recommends using any word processor to do it. --Stfg (talk) 10:53, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the FAQ link; I'd forgotten where it was. And yes, removing asterisks isn't too bad but many list-type articles have lots of table syntax, which is a bear to remove.--Miniapolis (talk) 03:50, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Wow, great job!
Hi everyone, this is Noraft, editing on my professional (alternate) account under my real name, Tony Ahn, and I just wanted to say you all have done a FANTASTIC job of keeping these drives going. I can't believe you all are about to have a queue that goes back less than a year, probably by the end of your next drive! It was FIVE YEARS long when I coordinated the first one. I especially take my hat off to SMasters and Diannaa for all their hard work keeping it going. You two are really awesome. I know I haven't participated much in 2011, but I've been paying attention. Kudos! I&#39;m Tony Ahn (talk) 00:30, 28 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much for your kind words. --Dianna (talk) 05:52, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Reminder: essay list of 2010 articles
This is a reminder of the essay-list of articles which had been copy-edit tagged for 2010, to review for last-minute fixes:
 * WP:2010 articles which needed copyedit - many articles have been completed.

Some of us editors new to WP:GOCE (such as myself) have needed to review our work and make a few further updates, based on later experiences. That essay provides an easy way for everyone to return to those formerly-tagged articles and check the added details. This drive mostly emptied the categories for March, April, May and June 2010. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:25, 1 December 2011 (UTC)