Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/November 2014

Perhaps not copyediting
List of governors of Tennessee has a tag for copyediting which says, "This article may require copy editing for the weird problem that puts the next section into a column to right of the main table of governors. You can assist by editing it. (October 2014)"

Yes, this is a weird problem, but perhaps not a copyediting problem. Maybe someone from GOCE is expert enough to fix this problem, but if not, what should the tag be?--DThomsen8 (talk) 01:37, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The clear template, placed after the table or image that is causing undesirable wrapping, fixes this problem when I use it. There might be a better way to do it, but that works for me. As for the copyedit template, it probably wasn't the best one, but it got the article fixed, so it wasn't the worst one either. There are some good ones listed at Template messages/Cleanup. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:51, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Economy of Hong Kong: review needed
Hi! Can someone kindly review my copy-editing for Economy of Hong Kong and give a bit of opinion on whether the Economic indicators section should/can be copy-edited? - Andrew Y talk 03:29, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Andrew, thanks for asking. I'm about to go offline for the night now, but I'll be happy to review your c/e tomorrow (2nd Nov). Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 02:29, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Andrew, I'll give a brief review of the c/e; all opinions are my own as a regular copy-editor. I'm basing my reivew on the diff here.


 * You've made some useful changes that have improved the reading of the text, changing ordinals from numerals to words, restructuring sentences and some condensing of over-wordy text. Italicising "laissez-faire", wikilinking "Network Readiness Index" and abbreviating initial public offering to (IPO) are examples of attention to detail. There's also a postive removal of editorialism; "(for more, see Exchange Bank Association)".


 * I spotted a few mistakes and ommissions. "the mainland China" occurs once in the leader/lede of the of pre-c/e version; you've added "the" to "mainland China" in the "Economic predictions" section. There's also a mid-sentence-capitalised "Mainland China" in the leader which you missed. In "Positive non-interventionism" you've pluralised "All land in Hong Kong is" to "All lands in Hong Kong are", which doesn't make sense if land is considered a commodity. Finally, in "Economic freedom" you've changed "The Index measures" to "The Index measure"; "index" is singular ("indices" is its plural)  and thus takes the singular verb form "measure". Also "Index" should be de-capitalised because it's not a proper noun on its own.


 * Summary: I think you've done a good copy-edit and have significantly improved the article's prose, made a handful of mistakes, and missed some opportunities to boldly improve the text further. Nice work though, well done. Feel free to remove the c/e template. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 19:19, 2 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks - I will correct the mistakes that I made and mark the page as complete. - Andrew Y talk 19:31, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Vetting articles
Just in case anyone wonders how the article numbers dropped so quickly, I vetted some of the July articles and removed Copy edit tags from those that were lacking references and retagged them more appropriately. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 07:52, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, that and Lfstevens being Lfstevens! Tdslk (talk) 20:05, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Christ on a bike! I mean, gosh that's impressive! :-D Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 21:00, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Copy-edit review?
Hi! Will someone please review my edits to Thai Pongal? My biggest confusion is whether or not I should italicize "Thai Pongal", which is the name of the festival and similar to "pongal", the name of the primary day of the festival and the name of the traditional dish served at the festival. The Manual of Style for foreign terms says to italicize foreign words uncommon in English, but I looked at Diwali and saw that it did not italicize "Diwali". As it is, I italicized and capitalized Pongal, the day; italicized but did not capitalize pongal, the dish; and capitalized but did *not* italicize Thai Pongal, the festival and page subject. Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Satkara (talk • contribs) 19:11, 4 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I read just the first part of the article and the italicization looks fine, so does the article (what I read) in general (although I think the full festival name, "Thai Pongal", is repeated too often, and that "Tamil people" deserves a "the" in front). Another way of stating the rule of what to italicize might be: if it can be wiki-linked, then no italicization is needed. Dhtwiki (talk) 07:28, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Satkara, thanks for asking for a review; I've been a little busy elsewhere last night, but I'll try and get it done this evening, so that's around 12-15 hrs after my timestamp. Dhtwiki, thanks for reading through the article; it's appreciated. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 08:11, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Review
Hi, I'm reviewing the c/e based on this diff.
 * Header/lead: There's some good condensing of excessively verbose text (waffle), rewriting and rearranging of material.


 * Background (was History): The retitling of the section is probably a good thing; you've moved a paragraph from the lead to this section. One problem arises here; that paragraph is unreferenced—I still think moving it down improves the article. merging the two sentences "This day coincides with Makara Sankranthi, a winter harvest festival celebrated throughout India. The day marks the start of sun’s six-month long journey northward, called the Uttarayanam" with "and" would improve the flow of the text and remove a repetition of "day".


 * Etymology: There's some minor, positive condensing of text here, improving the flow.


 * Pongal dish: Removing this section is a good choice; it is redundant to the main article, Pongal (dish), which iswikilinked for easy reference; also the section was unreferenced.


 * Days of Thai Pongal: Merging the sections "Bhogi", "Maatu Pongal" and "Kaanum Pongal" into a main section groups them nicely together; the non-Tamil reader knows they are part of the same festival.


 * Bhogi: The text is nicely condensed and the text about celebrations in different states is nicely merged together. "painted in colors" sounds odd; perhaps removing "in colors" would work better (and see my note at the end about spelling variants).


 * Pongal Pandigai: You made some good, minor changes here, and nicely rewrote the first paragraph to flow better. Again the section is unreferenced so checking the source isn't possible. Your rightly removed some POV text about the sun god from the end of the section.


 * Maatu Pongal: Again, you've nicely rewritten some largely nonsensical text; the subsection is now much clearer.


 * Kaanum Pongal: Another well-rewritten section, with some good removal of poorly-written and unreferenced material.


 * Pongal Wishes and Greetings:The title of the subsec should be changed to sentence case; only the first word takes a capital. The text is now cleaer, with a disambiguation of "Tamil" to "Tamil language".


 * Summary: You've done a good copy-edit with only a few minor points to pick out. One thing to be aware of; articles about Indian, Pakistani, Burmese, Sri Lankan and Bandladeshi topics are normally written in either British English or the local variant, all of which share British spellings, per WP:ENGVAR, so "colors" here should be "colours". Articles about these countries usually follow the dmy date format, so "January 14 or 15" should be "14 or 15 January", per the Manual of Style. it's a minor point here, but it's worth considering which variant the article should use. Well done.

Satkara, I'm not sure whether you're aware that an IP editor has since largely returned the text you removed to the article. they've added a few references too. Please don't feel obliged to revert or re-edit the article; that's just the way the wiki rolls, sadly. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 00:01, 6 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi, thank you so much for your review! It was extremely thorough and encouraging. I noticed that you formatted some of the references using a template; is that something expected of copy-editors on Wiki? kara ❈ talk  18:01, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
 * No worries; I'm glad it was helpful. I didn't do anything with the references, but I tagged some sections with a template Refimprove-section where I think some sources should be added—readers will want to know where the information comes from. Copy-editors aren't required to add these templates/tags, but they may do anything to improve the article if they think it's worthwhile. There are no hard-and-fast rules with copy-editng; our aim is to make the text clearer, more concise, and compliant with the Manual of Style. Btw I replaced the text altered by the IP after your c/e (s/he had returned most of the old, pre-c/e'd version) with your copy-edited text. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 05:00, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Need guidance with date and numbers
I have done cleanup(diff) of Religious conflicts in India, there are lots of number (number of things, distance) and dates and I need guidance with it. Thank you. --AmritasyaPutra T 17:15, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I skimmed it quickly, and the dates and numbers looked OK to me. Nice work. If you want to read Wikipedia's Manual of Style on dates and numbers, it is at Manual of Style/Dates and numbers. I'll warn you gently that the Talk page for that MOS page is a contentious place; if you like peace and harmony in your life, I'd stay away from it. (Although if you enjoy laughing at exhibitions of the narcissism of minor differences, jump right in.) – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:42, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks Jonesey95 ! --AmritasyaPutra T 01:29, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Leisure Suit Larry Review Request
Just dropping a line to see if anyone would be willing to take a look, review and see if the article is at a place where copy editing tag can be removed. Albeit, might need a citation/sources tag up top. Thanks! - Amintly (talk) 22:16, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It is improved, but it needs a little more work. I recommend reading it out loud to find additional places where fixes are needed. If you get stuck, I'll stop by the article and finish it up. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:00, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Jonesey95, I finished another pass at the article. If you'd be willing to throw some fresh eyes on it again—it would be much appreciated. Amintly (talk) 16:56, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Good work. I tweaked a few things. Time to move on. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:51, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

July 2013 Article
This week I did some work on an article from July 2013, removing the copyedit tag, and now I can't find it. Can someone help me? --DThomsen8 (talk) 16:08, 15 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Is there a way to look back at an old category of copyedits from July 2013?--DThomsen8 (talk) 17:35, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Just check your contributions; you should be able find it there. I don't think there's a method of discovering category histories, sorry. Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 01:12, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Progress report: new low article count in the backlog!
This is a mid-month progress report from one of your Guild of Copy Editors coordinators.

Thanks to your hard work, we have hit a new record low in our article backlog count! As of this writing, we are at 2,117 articles, and 2,000 articles is in our sights. We started the month with 2,483 articles in the backlog, and more articles are tagged every day, so we have edited over 400 articles so far this month. Great work!

We are also one article away from clearing out July 2013 (that article is being edited as I write this, so it will be done soon), and we have 83 articles left in August 2013; we should be able to clear that month with some diligent work.

A few reminders:
 * The main goal is to ensure that article prose is in good shape. Do not just do a quick pass over an article and remove the copy edit tag simply to get it out of the backlog list and take credit for it.
 * That said, it is acceptable to change the copy edit tag to another cleanup tag if the article's prose is too hopeless to copy edit, or if the article should really be deleted, or it is otherwise not ready for copy editing. You don't get to count that article toward your drive totals, but you get the satisfaction of helping to clear the backlog and improve the encyclopedia (a tiny bit).
 * Update the leaderboard! The leaderboard on the drive page is intended to foster a bit of friendly competition and appreciation for the work of your fellow editors. It is updated by you, not by magical wikibots. When you finish an article, add it to your list and update the leaderboard if you are in the top five of any of the categories. Again, don't do a weak job on articles just to pad your leaderboard stats; we're here to build an encyclopedia, after all.
 * Have fun! If it turns out that you don't enjoy copy editing, that's fine. There are lots of other ways to contribute to Wikipedia.

See you in the backlog! – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:09, 16 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the update, Jonesey, it's good to know the drive's going well. I've been vetting the August articles and have finished that month. I've sent a lot to cleanup, others to copyvio investigation, and removed some barely-referenced or unreferenced ones form the backlog. It seem some people think copy-editing means fixing the messes they can't—or won't— fix themselves. Ah well, it keeps me off the streets I suppose! ;-) Cheers, Baffle gab1978 (talk) 19:47, 16 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing you don't need to remind people that simply removing that CE tag and replacing with "delete" or another tag does not mean an article count of +1 for their drive total? ;¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 18:19, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Updated and expanded above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:07, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Last call
The November copy editing drive has ended. Please make any final edits to your article lists and the leaderboard (it is not updated automatically) in the next 12 hours or so. It is OK to edit your section of the page, and the leaderboard, even though the page is archived and says not to edit it.

Barnstars will be distributed in the next few days. Thanks to everyone who participated. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:02, 1 December 2014 (UTC)