Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Integration/Archive 1

move

 * Perhaps merge or rename this to Wikiproject Integration? "Integration" seems more like something people can "get" quickly. Summary here: WP:LOWP -Ste|vertigo 17:25, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Move done! Cwolfsheep 01:05, 8 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Qool! :) We should clue the mergist Wikipedians in, and then figure out how to simplify tasks for people. -Ste|vertigo 03:57, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Welcome Mergists!
I have not been aware of your existence until now, and I happily offer this project as a counter to the deletionist cabals & rampant inefficiencies of Wikipedia. Cwolfsheep 16:42, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you! My feeling is that good information should not be simply deleted here - and merging and redirection should become the norm, rather than deletion. Fresheneesz 19:59, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

And now for the contrary opinion
Which I'm not giving just to be contrary. I see that of the two major categories of thinkings (lumpers and splitters), you're a lumper. That's nice, but there are other POVs.

When I see a statement like: "stubs that will never grow beyond a reasonable measure" I tend to ask "How can you know?" A statement like "Stub articles belonging to a specific category with minimal content should be merged into a meta-article covering that subject matter," I tend to ask: "What for"?

First of all, you don't have a crystal ball about what stubs are destined for growth and which aren't. Since we don't know a thousandth of one percent of what there is to know about ANYTHING (to paraphrase Edison), how can you possibly tell what stubs will eventually be expanded and become full articles with subarticles and so on? That very process is how trees and Wikipedia grows from seeds and weeds, to become the forest that it is. For heavensake, there's a major article about every single character who appears in Star Trek. You may be disgusted by a full bio article on Wesley Crusher, when there is none on many major science topics, or else just stubs for the science, but content in encyclopedias is driven by user interest. Somebody will get to the stubs eventually, but meanwhile the trekkies outnumber us. So?

Meanwhile, stubs hurt nothing, so long as they are indexed for people reading the main topics. They're easy to find at a click. Meanwhile they serve as a bookmark for people saying: "Here's a potential article which could be long and interesting, except I don't happen to have the knowledge/time/heart to do it myself (right now). But I may return." And if I do, I may find that the very existence of the thing has drawn other interested people to dig a few more shovelfulls of dirt out of that little hole. Which is encouraging.

To paraphrase Gothe: "Whatever it is you have to do, BEGIN. There is genius and power and magic in simply STARTING a project." That's what a stub is.

Now, if your project is more about simply merging duplicate stubs so that people working on the same thing won't duplicate efforts, that's another matter entirely. But don't kill stubs that are just hanging out there in the breeze, not copied by anything else, and with room to grow. That's deadly to this whole process. S B Harris 19:34, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Well written. I'm not looking to destroy all stubs: some stubs are good. The idea is to eliminate duplicate content and de-orphanize articles that lack attention. Cwolfsheep 19:56, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Great, but give them liberal time before you define them as getting "no attention". And I don't mean stick a tag on them so that stubs not being monitored or watched MUST BE DESTROYED for the good of mankind. It doesn't work that way. These things are not taking up significant resources, they are harmless if not duplications, and they are meristematic cells for the thing that is Wikipedia. Stub = stem cells. For some science stubs, it make take months or even years before they come out of stasis and begin growing-- after which growth is then totally nonlinear, once some odd threshhold of community interest has been passed. S B Harris 20:24, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I should note that I oppose deletion in general: I redirect my merges with content preserved; I reserve my deletion votes or blanket redirects for the patently trivial. Cwolfsheep 20:53, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I might agree. I admit I'm not too familiar with the list of ongoing Wikiprojects, but it may be wise to seperate the two ideas -- merging duplicate content, and merging stub content. While I can see similarities, the one is a more obvious housekeeping task and the other seems more... I guess political is the right word. Just a thought. Best of luck. Luna Santin 22:40, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Not deleting all stubs!
I would like to make it clear that I am not looking to eliminate all stubs: merely to keep things orderly. Some articles aren't more than a sentence by design. Cwolfsheep 18:02, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Good work on ITU V-Series
I had seen how it was before; it's much better now. You changed a bunch of one-line articles with a giant series box into a large article with a small series box. --cesarb 15:19, 11 July 2006 (UTC)


 * 1) Thanks! If you can flag some other articles for attention, that would be most helpful. :) Cwolfsheep 00:31, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Earls of Orkney
If you follow the links from the list in Earl of Orkney, you will find very many sub-stub biographies, often no more than 10 words long. Some of these have been turned into redirects back to the main article, others have a little additional information but it's not clear that they are going to expand. Somebody interested may wish to compile a List of Earls of Orkney, summarising those biographies with longer articles and incorporating the minor stubs. TheGrappler 15:03, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Tagged the relevant categories for organization. Cwolfsheep 19:14, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

Guff like "Erlend Thorfinnsson was joint Earl of Orkney 1064–1098" (complete text of article) is an out-and-out waste of time, and smacks of "padding out" a certain stub category on the part of the author. Turning them into redirects seems like a plan, until such time as someone wants to write a real stub for any or all of them. Alai 05:03, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Places of local interest
I've recently created the above proposal, and it occurred to me that parts of it might be related to your guys' "mission". I'd invite anyone who's interested to take a look and comment on it or edit it to help make it better. TIA, JYolkowski // talk 14:29, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 13:52, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

step
I've left a note on the talk page of that template about how I feel it adds nothing and shouldn't be used. Your comments are welcome. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 17:24, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Participants?
It's somewhat traditional for a WPJ to have a section (or sub-page, or category, etc) for its participants. That seems to be lacking here. Alai 17:46, 8 November 2006 (UTC)


 * This project is more suggested guidelines and a clearinghouse for things to make use of, rather than a formal organization. Cwolfsheep 05:00, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * It's either a wikiproject, or it's not. It has "wikiproject" in its title, and none of it is marked as "guidelines", as proposals for same, or even as "essay".  If you're just going to treat it as a wholly-owned subsidiary, perhaps it should be userfied.  Alai 18:14, 7 December 2006 (UTC)


 * If you want to make it more formal, by all means. I did not intend this to be a personal project. Cwolfsheep 02:38, 8 December 2006 (UTC)


 * By all means which, though? It's not clear to me which of the above it's on its way to becoming...  Alai 03:32, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Step
Template:Step has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. --Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:30, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 18:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Wantman's alternative for categorization
I have looked over this project before, and mostly agree with its goals. However, as you probably know, I am not fond of catdiffuse and find that rather than integrate Wikipedia, it often fractures it into little pieces, especially as Wikipedia grows. I've seen some fine categories broken into microscopic pieces. Whenever I challenge this, I am accused of wanting monumentally huge categories, which is not what I want at all. What I am looking for is very similar to how the German Wikipedia is already set up. For the most part there are general indexes and specific indexes. They have populated categories for professions, as well as more specific ones. As we can already do some category integration using cat-scan, and this is certain to happen at some point in the future (it is being worked on now), I see little point in constantly breaking up categories into smaller pieces just because they reach a certain size. I think the question should be, what is the correct size for the general topic, and then what are the more specific sub-topics. As we have a tool for intersections (cat-scan) and not for category unions, there is no way to create the union once a category is broken up other than making a list.

I am part of a very small minority on this issue, and for that reason, I'm probably going to walk away from categorization issues if this trend continues. I don't think categories should be used as a classification system. For many categories (not all of them), it makes sense to be fully populated even though there are more specific subcategorizations. As this is a wiki, I have not objected when people made specific subcategorizations, I only started objecting when categories I thought were just fine were broken into subcategorizations which I don't think are better. I first got involved with this when I was working on articles about bridges. I went to browse Category:Bridges in New York City and found that all the toll bridges had been moved into a sub-category. I fought that battle (and won), but I've lost similar ones. For instance, I find Category:Bridges in England to be useless for me, because I know nothing about the different counties of England. This is the problem for many of these small subdivisions, if you don't know about the subject, or are looking to see a larger grouping, how do you browse? Category:Battles of the American Civil War are subcategorized by campaigns. I know nothing about these campaigns so I cannot decide which ones I want to browse through. Occupations are broken up by nationality. But what if nationality is irrelevant to the occupation? I want to browse through all film directors. Why do I have to look through every nationality? The Philatelist WikiProject did not want Category:Philatelists broken up for the same reasons.

I understand the arguments for diffusing categories, I think the main points are:
 * It helps maintain the category. Articles placed in the more general category eventually get diffused into the smaller most specific category.
 * People can find similar articles in these specific categories.
 * It is too hard to browse through a large category.

I don't buy these arguments. Granted it does help maintain the category, but I don't think that should be the criteria by which we decide how to categorize. The amount of work involved in maintaining categories is not the way to design an Encyclopedia. People can find similar articles in small specific categories, but they can't find more of them in more general categories. Why is this an either?or proposition? I think we should pick two sizes that best fit each topic - a general size and a specific size. Both could be populated. In many cases the specific size is a category intersection, and eventually we won't need these at all. I don't think it is hard to browse through a large category. 30 years ago I used to work in a library. I used to love to browse through the subject and author catelogs (pre computerized). Why do perfectly fine categories need to be diffused just because they have gotten large and subcategories have been created? If the category was useful when it was small it is still useful when it is big. The appropriate size for a populated category is one that corresponds to articles that are being written. We have articles about bridges and articles about specific types of bridges. If we have an article about suspension bridges, I would expect a fully populated Category:Suspension bridges. It is populated now. But let's say that it grows to be 1000 articles and people create categories for suspension bridges by country. Does that mean that Category:Suspension bridges should be diffused? I say absolutely not. If you read an article and you want to browse through articles of that type, they should all be together. Size isn't the issue.

As an alternative to Catdiffuse, I've been working on Category types. I'd appreciate if you could take a look at it. The templates I've come up with could be used whether or not categories get duplicated the way I propose. I think the average person reading Catdiffuse has no idea what it is talking about. I've tried to make templates that are much less self-referential.

I'm sorry I'm going on and on again. I've said this all before. I can't seem to convince anyone about this so I'll be quiet from now on and find something else to work on. Good luck with your project. -- Samuel Wantman 07:24, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Would it be OK if I removed the phrase "to avoid becoming too large" from this template. Some categories require diffusion, while others should be large lists anyway.  This may solve Samuel Wantman's problems with this template.  Dr. Submillimeter 13:31, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * This discussion is continuing at Template talk:CatDiffuse. Dr. Submillimeter 21:04, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Redirect to anchors and R with possibilities.
Not sure how best to approach this, but could I recommend adding the usage of and redirects with anchor links into the guidelines of the project? I know that for myself, at least, I was very much opposed to this project before, when all redirects kicked you to the top of the page. Now that redirects can go to an anchored heading, most redirects created from former articles should probably use them, especially if the format of the new article is a list of mini-articles as section headers. The R with possibilities is less relevant, but it does ensure that people don't incorrectly replace links to the redirect with direct links- if the article is ever expanded back out, then replaced links would be obsolete.

Instruction creep is bad, and this page is admirably brief as it stands, but these strike me as fairly important. SnowFire 05:10, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Cymbal manufacturers
There is currently a proposal to merge a number of stubs about cymbal manufacturers into the article Cymbal manufacturers. Problems with the article title aside, could this project offer an opinion on whether this is a necessary step? Also, would anyone here be familiar with precedents for similar situations? –Unint 19:33, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

The merge went ahead. IMO it was a bad idea. We now have an article for Istanbul Agop Cymbals but none for UFIP or Wuhan, which is a bit strange. Basically, we have a perennial problem with people trying to use Wikipedia to promote their own favourite cymbal brands and/or denigrate ones they don't like, see this series of edits for example. IMO this merge has just aggravated the problem, by promoting the highly-hyped "major" brands, while at the same time making it seem that input from those knowledgeable about the alternatives is unwelcome. Andrewa 17:39, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

The articles on Wuhan cymbals and UFIP still exist, and are part of the parent Cymbal manufacturers article. They can now be found easier as I have redirected them directly to the appropriate section. All the information is there. If more information is added so they become large enough to be credible stand alone articles (such as with Paiste), then they can be broken out from the parent article in summary style. — Preceding unsigned comment added by SilkTork (talk • contribs)


 * I think this is playing with words. Yes, the information is there, but the articles don't exist.


 * The current situation is that Category:Cymbal manufacturing companies contains individual articles on eight makers, including the so-called major manufacturers. There seems no particular pattern to the other four articles; At least one is flagged as a stub, although it does contain quite significant information, and another two of the articles overlap in scope.


 * IMO we'd be far better having stubs than short sections on all other significant (encyclopedic) cymbal makers. There's far less incentive to work on a section than a stub, even if the section is flagged as needing expansion. That's what stubs are for. Andrewa 15:00, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Isn't this kind of a bad idea?
I mean, in many articles I have seen (mostly regarding computer technologies, which is a large portion of the wikipedia entries I view) articles are merged unnecessarily. The point of the project is to avoid over-specialization of topics? Well, there are many topics that -need- that kind of intense stratification. With something as complex as computer operating system hierarchies, sub-systems, and product histories, the difference between _X Article_ 1.1 and _X Article_ 1.2 is vast. I have found that when many of these articles are merged, they end up simplifying and abridging important information. The inter-linking and proper grouping aspect is great, and part of what makes wikipedia so useful, however I guess I just want to point out that in some cases the integration of pages has gone too far, to the detriment of users and the topics wiki is attempting to cover. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gavin86 (talk • contribs) 14:54, 13 March 2007 (UTC).


 * If my experience with cymbal manufacturers is anything to go on, this is just another attempt to get rid of stubs. If that's what it is, then yes, it's a very bad idea. Andrewa 09:30, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

This is a good idea
As a mergist, I feel that the goals of this WikiProject are some of the best possible ones that Wikipedia could have right now.--h i s  s p a c e   r e s e a r c h 09:59, 4 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I second that —  iride scent   (talk to me!)  22:40, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I third that, and say we should start integrating!  SilkTork  * SilkyTalk 18:29, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Battle for the Bangladesh Liberation War article
The single most important happening in the history of Bangladesh, one of the major happenings in the Cold War with major implications for India and Pakistan and some implication for USA, USSR and China, one of the major political geographical change in the post-WWII world besides splitting of Korea and merger of Germany and the biggest genocide of this period, and a somewhat a cause celibre for the flower generation besides the Vietnam War - this certainly warrants some attention... well, a lot of attention. The article has just gone through a collaboration of active WikiProject Bangladesh participants who are not large in number, and needs a lot of help from the community.

I see that it copies a lot of stuff from Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, spread over two sections, and 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, which looks like a better place to accommodate much of the information provided in the Liberation War article. I sincerely believe that reducing redundancy between articles and evolving articles to sharper and neater shape is a much desirable goal. Please, take a look at the article and the peer review of the article. Please, post your comments, and lend a hand hand, too, if possible. Thanks. Aditya (talk • contribs) 07:26, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Implicit merger
Please, help to improve my new essay, which has a close relationship to aims of your project. More examples and rectifying of my poor English are welcome. Ask me at meta:talk:Implicit merger if something is not clear. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 15:53, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

This page needs a clear intro
I was directed here, looking for basic guidance on how to merge two pages. I don't see clearly how to do that. Can it be included near the top. (I may come back and do it myself, when I find the relevant info.) Earthlyreason (talk) 06:48, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

hello, regarding this stub-article, i request, if it may, become recognised as part of the main topic regarding the stub-articles that are requested as pertinent to the article regarding 'most worthy information in articles' Oh somthing like that... if i write this comment now i have contributed and it is pertinent then wiki vote may take place and the suppresion system will regard this as inpertinent so not as pertinent as the real deal pertinance-1 (suppresion is not pertinent) then add article to not so pertinent list and search more and what everyone else wrote else goodbye Timeturn (talk) 20:37, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

did that do anything ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Timeturn (talk • contribs) 20:54, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

My attempt to contribute
Text that was in Southern United States Culture has now been merged into Culture of the Southern United States, as my first attempt to help out with the WP:INT Project. I hope to merge more articles soon. NickDupree (talk) 21:45, 13 August 2009 (UTC)