Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Archive 3

New script for WP:IE assessment

 * NB: I have now found out that User:Outriggr had developed a hugely-improved version of his script called User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js. This offers much more functionality than my crude hacking effort, and I recommend that editors use User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js, which makes it very easy to add or chnage an assessment. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:16, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

In accordance with our policy of continually updating and improving our world-class products to meet the needs of our discerning and loyal customers ... blah blah blah.

OK, I have tweaked the User:Outriggr/metadata.js script to make it more useful for WP:IE assessment. The tweaked version can be found at User:BrownHairedGirl/metadata.js

To use it, edit your monobook.js and add

NB If you are already using Outriggr's version, my version is intended as a replacement ... so if your monobook.js includes

... then you need to replace that with

When you have installed it, you will need to bypass your browser's cache to see the effect.:::

Outriggr's very clever script sniffs around the article's talkpage for any sign that the article has been tagged as start, stub, etc. That's very useful, but it wasn't specific enough for me: I wanted to know how the article is tagged for this project, and outriggr's script just takes the first wikiproject tag it can find.
 * What it does

My enhanced version looks specifically for this project's tags, and &mdash; here's the clever bit &mdash; displays the whole of the tag on the article page, and includes a direct link to edit section 0 of the talk page, which saves having to first go the talk page then load it again for editing.

The display of the tag is a bit bulky, so initially it will be hidden. You can show or hide it by using the little button which appears to the right of the "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" text below the article title. The button looks like this:
 * [[Image:Flag of Ireland.svg|22px]] Show/hide WPIE tag

If the article is not tagged for WikiProject Ireland, then instead of that button you will see:
 * Not tagged for WikiProject Ireland

Hope this is useful. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:14, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks, will certainly give it a try. My existing script has been having some problem today, hoping that stops (appears to be a conflict with something in the Skype element of Internet Explorer, strange). SeoR (talk) 23:40, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Works like a dream, go raibh maith agat indeed. SeoR (talk) 00:01, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry BHG, but it overrides my ability to tag articles using other templates and it just give me an error page when the edit button is pressed. If you like have a look at this version] of my monobook and try it out if you need to see what the problem is. Cheers ww2censor (talk) 02:37, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I am not sure what happened to the edit button, and I can't test it without knowing which page it failed on.
 * However, the reason it removed the other functions is because you used to replace User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js rather than the earlier User:Outriggr/metadata.js on which I had based my script, and for which User:BrownHairedGirl/metadata.js was advertised as a replacement.
 * I didn't know about Outriggr's new, very-muchly-enhanced script, and I think that in nearly every respect it is very much better than my rather crude one. I really wish I had known about the new script before spending a few hours on my hacking efforts, but I will now abandon mine and start using the new User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:11, 13 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, all of the above work for me, so I will choose between the latest Outriggr and the BHG.  Anyway, all are better than manual.  Under 3600 to go :-)  SeoR (talk) 11:19, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Well under 3600, I think :) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:44, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * BHG, sorry you ended up spending a lot of time on something you have now abandoned, but thanks for your work on this and all the other stuff you do. Cheers ww2censor (talk) 14:08, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

(deindent) : Thanks indeed, and yes, below 3050 by now, in fact. Pleasant to think we'll have gone from 5k + to 3k - by tomorrow. SeoR (talk) 20:02, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
 * And with aid of the wonderful User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js, I did a further blitz over the weekend, bringing the tally down to 2100. That script makes the job a lot faster! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:41, 17 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Wonderful! With that kind of pace, new volunteers will not be needed :-) Below 2000 now, and more letters closed off.  And to think that as recently as August there were 939 Assessed and only 1226 or so tagged at all! On with G and K... SeoR (talk) 20:13, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
 * More blitzing has brought the tally down to only 1050. I have now assessed over 2300 WP:IE articles since the counter started clicking on the new tagging script last friday, and I need a break ... but this is starting to look like a job that could be finished rather than an impossible mountain. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:52, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Wow, 1050!! I'll take a little credit for your massive assessment work :)> as I introduced you too User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js, but you still did all the work. Thanks ww2censor (talk) 00:04, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Amazing - 2.3k in under a week! Yes, even with the other 5000 or so waiting, looks very do-able! SeoR (talk) 13:38, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I really wish I had a clue about those script thingies! Good work. Sarah777 (talk) 13:04, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Unassessed is empty. Just in time for Easter and some relaxation, especially for BHG. what's next? ww2censor (talk) 22:35, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

It's empty
Yeeeha!! Category:Unknown-importance Ireland articles is now empty!

(I didn't succeed in sticking to my plan to take a break from tagging, and when I got below 500, decided I wanted to finish off the assessment job).

Anyway, congrats to everyone who has taken part in this massive assessment drive: we have come a long way :)

However, now for the bad news: this is just the end of phase one.

This exercise was based on the 5000 or so unassessed stub articles which BHGbot had tagged at the start of January (see User:BHGbot/Job0007).

(oops, phone -- will finish this post later). -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:03, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Very well done! It was great to contribute but I'm afraid the small band of us must defer to your power drive, so many thousand.  Ready for next batch :-)  SeoR (talk) 12:51, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes indeed - wonder what the rate of new (Irish related) article formation is? I'm discovering maybe two per day so I assume the figure is much higher. Biographies are definitely the growth area - "locations" a distant second. Sarah777 (talk) 20:49, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, especially bios of footballers, hurlers, and other sportsfolk. I think most of the primary locales are gone. SeoR (talk) 22:39, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * There seems to be a trickle of townlands, but I agree that biogs are the main growth area from what I see. Some of them are good, but there are also a lot of marginally notable people: two-line stubs on people who played one football/hurling/cricket match and about whom nothing else seems to be known. I recently AFDed a group of hurlers about whom nothing at all seemed to be known other than their names and the presence in one match for one club.
 * However, apart from that sort of trivia, I think there are a lot genuinely notable mid- or low-importance figures for whom there are not yet biographies: in literature, politics and science, there are a lot of missing people. And there are a lot of maritime articles waiting to be written.
 * We still have more assessments to do (see below), but I think it's now time to start thinking about how we can start using the assessments we have done to target articles for improvement ... which could also be a great way to recruit more people to the project. I'll post some ideas on that below.
 * One last comment, though, in this section: this would be a good time to review the top- and high-importance categories. I just took a quick peek at Category:High-importance Ireland articles, and I see that includes:
 * Ennis, lovely place, but it's only a mid-sized county town.
 * Clonmel, ditto.
 * Boyzone. W2c, what were you thinking of?
 * Sammy Miller. Yes, Sammy who?
 * Islam in Ireland. My bestest friend is muslim, but, really, islam is a very small force in Ireland.
 * Joey Dunlop. No, he didn't invent tyres.
 * Irish road bowling. I stuck my neck out on this one, but is it a step too far? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:04, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Ennis and Clonmel are county towns so the rating probably just follows the rules we made. While I find it difficult to think of Boyzone as "important" they would have a high international recognition (not admiration necessarily!) and I believe they were in the top rank of UK success in commercial terms. The rest I'd agree with. Not least 'cos I never heard of Sammy or Joey - who are they indeed? Sarah777 (talk) 01:00, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * You're right, the guidance at WikiProject Ireland/Assessment does say to grade county towns as high. I must admit I didn't actually barf at seeing Sligo in the list, so maybe it's my prejudices. Can we do a deal? Clonmel and Ennis stay as high-importance but Vikingville goes to low-priority, and the centre of the universe goes to top priority? ;) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)
 * Us True Blue (blow-in) Dubs would man the barricades at the very thought of such a move! Prepare for WAR !!!!! Sarah777 (talk) 01:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Back to this topic, as discussed at Top Criteria Articles and Progress, and Top / High above on this page. I think I can accept all official county towns as High, just about.  But some of the others just mentioned I think are worth a second look.  Boyzone might better qualify as Mid, along with Sammy Miller, and perhaps, at this time, Islam in Ireland.  I think a review of Top and High to very stringent standards is fair - just including an item says "this is notable" so almost all should be Low to Mid. SeoR (talk) 01:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * A review of High and especially Top is quite in order. Of the article listed above, both Joey Dunlop and Sammy Miller are very notable in motorcycling sport over generations, so should stay; they are not Mids. I seem to remember agreeing to county towns being rated High when we set up the quality criteria guidelines last year. Reviewing 53 Top articles should be easy enough; 405 High will take a little longer, but, now that we can breath for 5 minutes, we should do this. IMHO Islam in Ireland and Irish road bowling do seem to be rather overrated and should be low and mid respectively. ww2censor (talk) 02:28, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * ww2c, I agree with demoting Islam in Ireland to low and Irish road bowling to mid, but I want to pick up on your point above: that "Joey Dunlop and Sammy Miller are very notable in motorcycling sport over generations" (emphasis added by me). That's my concern, that their notability is sectoral, and they remain obscure outside those follow that sport, To my mind, for something or someone to get a high-importance to be rated as high importance, it needs to be highly important in a wider sense. Shergar, for example, became a household name and was not just known to horse-reaching fans, and likewise Jack Charlton was well-known about even by people like me who can't tell one one end of a football from the other. Dunlop and Miller may well have been top of their game, but their game remains relatively unknown; neither is comparable with Christy Ring or Johnny Giles, both of whom were nationally-known national figures. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:18, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, BHG, I will concede Sammy Miller but I still think Joey Dunlop was so well know in Ireland, and not just around motorsport, that he deserves a high as opposed to a mid rating. ww2censor (talk) 03:40, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I can buy Mr Dunlop, as he was well-known, and over an extended period, and internationally. He would be the only Irish motorcycling star I could name.  And while I still question Boyzone, especially on the "enduring prominence" aspect, they can be considered in the "music" dimension of a larger review.  Given the much-expanded Irish space (from 3.x thousand to 12.x), we can maybe expand our allowances - 80 to 120 Top, for example, and perhaps 500 or 600 High...?
 * Per the earlier discussion, and the handy listing put forward by Flowerpotman, I think that for Top, we should decide what topics should be there (the broad issue articles, xx of/in Ireland,  along with key specific topics) and ensure we are.  High is probably more of a filtering of what is tagged already. SeoR (talk) 07:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I concur on Joey Dunlop - the man is especially noteworthy for his performances over many years in the Isle of Man TT race. The main article even has a photo of him at the top! Bardcom (talk) 18:20, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

BHGbot again
Now that we have finished assessing the last batch of articles, I need to run BHGbot again. This is a little difficult, because AWB only runs under BillOS and my WindozePC is very frail ... but the good news is that I have discovered PerlWikipedia which offers a very easy to use framework to access Wikipedia using Perl scripts. So I am a writing a simple bot in Perl to identify and tag the unassessed articles.

I'm going to start by writing the code to scan for untagged stubs, and tag them as was done in BHGbot/Job0007: this time round, we shouldn't find another 5,000 articles to assess!

Once that is done, I'll start work on the code to scan all the Ireland categories for untagged articles. That will be slightly more difficult, but I think that Category:Category-Class Ireland articles will do as a starting point. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:41, 25 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Looking forward to the new challenge. 20-something new unassessed appeared, and I have cleared a fair few, but left a nibble of the last few :-) SeoR (talk) 01:27, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * OK, I'm still tweaking code, but have generated a list of articles in Category:Ireland stubs and its subcats whose talk pages have not been tagged with the WikiProject Ireland banner (or its aliases). Only 356 of them, which is rather less than I had feared. I'll upload the list now to: User:BrownHairedGirl/Untagged Ireland stub articles. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:07, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Progress report and a suggestion
The latest update of the assessment statistics shows that we now have over 13,800 assessed articles, only one of which has no importance rating. That's a jump of over 1000 since the previous statistics five days earlier, which is accounted for partly after we emptied Category:Unknown-importance Ireland articles because I did a big trawl through GAA articles (clubs and events only, I didn't do many players), and then used my bot-generated list of untagged stubs to assess all but 40 outstanding stub articles.

Further progress will have to involve the articles not tagged as stubs, and that part of BHGbot is still under development. I the meantime, I think that it would be a good idea to try to keep on top of the new stubs, so I would like to suggest that I set BHGbot to automatically generate a new list of unassessed stubs every day, and to upload it to project space. It's the only BHGbot function which is working properly so far, but I think it's worth deploying even before the rest of BHGbot has been codded and approved through the BRFA process. I suggest putting the list at WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Unassessed stubs &mdash; does all this seem OK? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:09, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * That sounds fine. ww2censor (talk) 14:12, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Good idea. Sarah777 (talk) 15:37, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I have been updating it daily, and have found five to 10 new stubs appearing every day, most of which I have assessed as they appear. I haven't yet found out a way to exclude the overseas GAA articles, but I'll have word with the GAA project about whether we could create some appropriate categories which i could then exclude.

One issue I have noticed is that the stubs list is incomplete, because many stub articles in Irish topics don't have an Irish stub tag -- they may for example have football-stub but be in an Irish category, and the way the bot is working at the moment doesn't pick up those articles. (I'm not worried about this: the others will be picked up at a later date when I expand the bot's scope)

In the meantime, I have also set the bot to create some more lists:
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish politicians
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged GAA articles
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged geography articles

... and I would welcome any further suggestions for subsets of Irish articles which could make further work lists.

There are a few reasons why I'm doing it this way rather than tagging directly:
 * 1) I haven't yet written the code for tagging the articles
 * 2) the sub-categories of Category:Ireland includes lots of non-Irish categories, and I'm still tweaking the code to exclude them from the trawl, which is why I'm working on subsets of Category:Ireland
 * 3) I'm finding that the lists are in many ways more useful than applying empty tags, because the lists offer direct links to the articles, whereas the categories (e.g. Category:Unknown-importance Ireland articles) list the talk pages, which is a pain to work with: load the talk, and then you have to click the view article button before starting assessment.

Hope this helps. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:44, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
 * At a quick glance you are picking up some Scottish mountains like An Teallach, Arkle (hill), Ben Nevis, etc., most likely all of them, perhaps because it is already tagged by the WikiProject British and Irish hills which must be why Welsh and English mountains are also on the list. I also noticed some oddities like the movie About Adam which does have a Dublin related category but makes no claim to the facts of the category in the write up. I am sure there are more but with 6,500+ I am not going to look at them all. I also noticed that you picked up Angela’s Ashes but for some reason not Angela's Ashes (film) which has a category:Irish films attached. Perhaps we just need to be aware of such possible mistags while manually assessing after tagging. Any idea why Metropolitan borough is on the list? Cheers ww2censor (talk) 23:12, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I had noticed the Scottish hills, and English ones too. I haven't yet figured out precisely how they are working they way in there, but it's not due to wikiproject tags -- there must some badly parented hill-related mainspace category, but despite some burrowing I can't yet see which.
 * Not sure about Metropolitan borough, but it's on the list of oddities to check! Thanks for your ever-eagle eye :) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:12, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem is due to a bug in the Perlwikipedia pcakage. Much more work needed before the bot progresses from generating lists to actually tagging articles. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:42, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

B-class assessment criteria
Whilst assessing Dundrum Castle, I noticed that below the WikiProject Military history banner, there was a comment setting out a checklist of that project's B-class assessment criteria:
 * B-Class checklist
 * 1) It is suitably referenced, and all major points are appropriately cited.
 * 2) It reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain major omissions or inaccuracies.
 * 3) It has a defined structure, including a lead section and one or more sections of content.
 * 4) It is free from major grammatical errors.
 * 5) It contains appropriate supporting materials, such as an infobox, images, or diagrams.

I think that those criteria are rather good. What do folks think of WP:IE adopting those criteria? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:47, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Agree - Those sound like a good set of criteria for any B-class article. Who else is in? ww2censor (talk) 16:35, 1 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Agree. Perhaps we could qualify a little on points 2 and 5, but the principles are good. SeoR (talk) 10:20, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Christy Ring
Hi folks, I have just assessed the article on Christy Ring as start-class and high-importance, and I'd like a second opinion.

First, importance: he is probably the best-known GAA player of all time, and his notability extends even to those with no interest at all in the GA: he's national figure. so I reckon he should be either top or high importance. I'm wary of promoting any article to top-importance, but should this have been one that did make the grade?

Second, article-quality. It had been rated as B-class for WPBIO, but I downgraded it to start-class because it has no inline citations, per the criteria discussed above. Is that OK? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:01, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Seems like a reasonable rationale for giving it the Start/High rating. ww2censor (talk) 17:07, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I'll agree if you make him the second best known after one Sam Maguire :) Gnevin (talk) 18:12, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Fair point. I rated Sam Maguire as mid-importance, and it seems to me that he should really be revised to High-importance. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:42, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * That's grand, can't think of anyone else who would be high Gnevin (talk) 19:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Grand indeed. I'll agree to that too. ww2censor (talk) 19:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Michael O'Hehir and Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh perhaps should be top importances. O'Hehir in particular, hes kind of a national figure. Derry Boi (talk) 13:24, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I disagree on those two. Both are very well-recognised in a GAA context, as long-serving and exceptionally skilled sports broadcasters, but in a wider national context they don't really step outside the "excelled-in-their field" box to a wider national significance. Both are much less notable than Pat Kenny or Gay Byrne. The latter two are rated perversely as mid and high -- really ut should be Kenny->Mid, Byrne->High (or even top); Gaybo was the face of Irish television for nearly 40 years, and had major influence in changing Ireland. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:09, 5 April 2008 (UTC)


 * (deindent) Seconded on Ring and Maguire. In all of Irish history, I would see few people even at High, and next to none at Top.  Key commentators such as O'Hehir and Ó Muircheartaigh were national figures but Mid seems perfectly fair. SeoR (talk) 12:16, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Years

 * Should years such as 1916 in Ireland be rated so high or at all? Years are just lists Gnevin (talk) 11:41, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Is 1916 not one of the most important years in Irish history? Surely no one disagrees with that? ww2censor (talk) 13:48, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * No but its the event of the year that are highly important not the list of events, not the year if that makes sense ? Gnevin (talk) 14:13, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, maybe, but you are splitting hairs. In that case, in your opinion, no year in any country is of any importantance, only the events themselves. ww2censor (talk) 14:18, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I'd rate 1916 as mid. The rising was top-importance, but overall the year isn't as important as 1922, which saw the foundation of the Free State, the start of the civil war and the acceptance by the south of of partition. In other words, 1916 had one hugely-significant event, but 1922 had a lot of high-importance events. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:47, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I see the point, and would say that the main emphasis should be on important events, and almost all Years should be just Low. But for a few, notably with multiple important events, I'd be willing to go Mid. SeoR (talk) 12:13, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * SeoR, I think that's a good principle, and one that I got wrong when I initially assessed a whole batch of 19th-century year-in-Ireland articles as mid-importance. I thunk that any which haven't already been downgraded to low should be re-graded now, but first I think we should clarify a list of exceptions. There are plenty of hugely important events in Irish history, but the only years that I can think of as being candidate for exceptional importance are: 1603, 1798, 1801, 1916, and 1922. The famine may be too spread out over several years to make it easy to single out a particular one, and after 1922 I don't see any truly exceptional years until the start of The Troubles, and again I'm not sure about selecting a few particular years from that period. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:44, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

All-Ireland finals
I have almost finished assessing the GAA articles. The BHGBot-generated list of Untagged GAA articles  now mostly consists of non-Irish GAA articles ... and about 75 articles on All-Ireland football finals.

I reckon that the overview article at All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is correctly-rated as high-importance, but I'm not so certain on how to rate the individual years. My hunch is that they should all be rated as low-importance, though there may be a case for mid-importance. Any thoughts? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:42, 5 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd second that. Any mass groups of articles, from individual councillors or TDs to suburbs or small towns to individual years (GAA or general), should be Low except for standouts.  Low still means Notable, after all. SeoR (talk) 12:12, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Sound logic! I'll rate them all as low-importance unless there is any clear reason for one of them getting a higher rating. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:01, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Agree with all the above, unless there is some overriding reason to rate as a mid-importance. ww2censor (talk) 15:32, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * And there hasn't been a standout All-Ireland since 1995. Sarah777 (talk) 16:28, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
 * :-) But glad we have consensus - mass groups of articles do have value but must be managed vis-a-vis tools such as ratings, for the ratings to remain useful. SeoR (talk) 12:10, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Yet more assessments done, many more to do
Hi folks, I have been plugging away with assessments, and have assessed another 800 or thereabouts articles over the last week. (see the stats). We now have just under 15,400 articles assessed, which is great progress.

The latest dose has been GAA articles from the BHGbot-generated list, which were a bit slow to do, because most of the articles also need extra work: missing stub tags added, missing d.o.b. categories added, unreferenced/primarysources tags to be added etc, which slows the job down a lot. On about 20 of them, I couldn't decide an importance rating, and those have ended up in Category:Unknown-importance Ireland articles. Does anyone have a few minutes to assess them?

I'm now ploughing through politicians. All those in Category:Political office-holders in the Republic of Ireland have already been assessed, so I'm now working off a BHGbot-generated list of untagged articles in Category:Political office-holders in Ireland. With the Republic done, the remaining articles in the list consist of post-partition Northern Irish politicians as well as those from the whole island pre-1922; I estimate another day or two's work for me to finish them (they are easier than the GAA articles, because most are in better shape).

However, I reckon that there are several thousand other articles remaining to be assessed. I'm still working on the code to automatically tag them, but in the meantime I can highly recommend working off lists. Two advantages are that the links are to the article rather than the talk pages (which saves reloading, and also that the articles are reasonably similar, which helps in assessing importance.

Would anyone else like to volunteer to assess a particular group of articles? If so, I can easily set BHGbot to generate a list of untagged articles in that field, and to update it frequently. A few suggestions:
 * Towns and villages
 * Landforms
 * Media
 * Footballers (there are probably a lot of them!)
 * Writers (no idea how many)

Any volunteers? With the User:Outriggr/metadatatest.js script, each assessment can be done quite quickly. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I'll volunteer for Towns and Villages. Second preference would be Writers. Another 800 - amazing! SeoR (talk) 21:42, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I'll make both lists tomorrow, and you can see how you get on. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:23, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Depending on the number, I will do the Media or the Landforms. ww2censor (talk) 23:16, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Great, two volunteers! I'll make those lists too, and you can take your pick. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:14, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Assessment lists
OK, I have made a few lists:
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish landforms (60 untagged of 545)—ww2
 * Done this 1st 60 - rated Rivers, Lagan Foyle and Barrow as high - Is that too much? Several crappy articles need merging, sources, etc. ww2censor (talk) 05:45, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish media (118 untagged of 260)
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish writers (570 untagged of 1271)-seoR
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish music (1972 untagged of 2600) (note some overlap with writers, because songwriters appear in both trees, but a lot of the articles appear to be songs)
 * WikiProject Ireland/Assessment/Untagged Irish footballers (878 untagged of 1460)

A few notes:


 * I'll use the bot to regenerate the lists every day, so they will shrink as they are completed. If any non-Irish stuff has sneaked in, pls lemme know, and I can set the bot to exclude the the relevant categories.
 * The music list is horribly huge. If anyone is interested in working on the music stuff, I could break down the task by setting the bot to generate lists for subcats, e.g..
 * I know nobody volunteered for the footballers, but thought I'd make the list anyway, if only to see what the stats look like

Sorry, no towns & villages yet :( that will have wait for a further bit of coding. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:10, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * PS To avoid duplication of effort, I suggest stick your name beside a list you are working on, so that others know not to bother with it. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:11, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Good to see Music and Foorballers, best to understand scale of challenge :-)  Will start with Writers, and await Towns and Villages (no rush).  Magic script ready and waiting. SeoR (talk) 09:58, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Is there a script for adding source, cleanup, refimprove, etc. tags? I would find that useful in doing the assessments like these. ww2censor (talk) 14:53, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * There! I had meant to leave a note about FRIENDLY, which is truly brilliant - that and twinkle are pretty much essential for this work. To use Friendly, just add the following line to your monobook.js:


 * ... and then completely refresh your browser by bypassing your cache (hit Control-Shift-R in Firefox). Hope that helps! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:22, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Sounds nice, I had been building a list in Wordpad, and that just is not convenient, and my machine does not run Twinkle. SeoR (talk) 19:39, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * That is a good script but it only seems to work with Firefox, not Safari, on my Mac. Maybe I need to do this type of work on Firefox only, thanks BHG. ww2censor (talk) 23:45, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I used Opera for everything for many years, but started using Firefox because Adblock was so useful ... and now the wikipedia scripts are so important to my browser use that I use Firefox for nearly everything. I know that browser choice is a personal preference, and I have strong preferences, but those scripts are so useful that I'd switch browser again if needed just to retain them (so long as the switch was not to Internet Exploder!).
 * SeoR, what operating system do you use? There may be some way of Twinkling you :) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:09, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * You might consider Flock which got a good review recently in Macworld, is based on the Mozilla engine and available for Mac, Win and Linux, and the tagging works on the Mac version. ww2censor (talk) 02:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I fear that my main environment, on a work PC, is the terrible combination of Windoze and IExploder. I do also have Opera on the home PC, though. I shall see if the work PC can also have Firefox. SeoR (talk) 07:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Politicians done
I have now assessed all the untagged Irish politicians (i.e. Category:Irish politicians and all its subcats, another 900 or so articles) and am now starting work on Untagged Irish politics articles, i.e. articles in Category:Politics of Ireland or its sub-categories, which contains 967 articles to start with. :(

BTW, whilst going through the politicians, I found several more apparent non-notables, which I have nominated at AfD: see Deletion sorting/Ireland. Comments welcome! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:30, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Chief Secretaries
In the course of tagging politicians, I encountered an article on a Chief Secretary for Ireland, and set about tagging the rest of them, working backwards from 1922. I decided to rate them as mid-importance in view of the significance of the job (head of the British administration in Ireland after 1801), but now I'm not so sure.

The biographical articles on the ChiefSecs mostly say little about their role, but I presume that's because the sources from which the biogs are written take a British viewpoint, in which the Irish posting was a low rung on the Cabinet ladder, an early step up for a politician on the rise. (It rarely seems to have been a resting point for those on the way down, as the Northern Irish job was for Jim Prior in the 1980s).

My doubts are two:fold:
 * 1) I wonder how significant the job actually was. For various reasons, my history books are all boxed away at the moment, so I don't have any sources to consult. Can anyone help?
 * 2) Most chief secs held the post remarkably briefly, for an average of only two years. Even if the post was significant, two years isn't usually long enough for an individual office-holder to make much of an impact

Any thoughts? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:13, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Recalling my history, the job was somewhat nominal, a political step, the main work being done at Under-Secretary level and just below. I think the role itself is Mid to High, as its nominal powers were great, but the individuals, vis-a-via Ireland, probably most just Notable (ie Low), save those who brought some significant change. SeoR (talk) 09:56, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * That sounds good.
 * BTW, I just found Henry Grattan untagged, and have assessed him as top-importance. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:16, 7 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Great. Grattan certainly was. Some of the Chief Secretaries and also the undertakers (Conolly, for example) had huge influence. SeoR (talk) 19:38, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I found a few more High-importance articles which should show up in the next bot run, and another Top-importance one: Catholic Emancipation. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:04, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I just found one more another top-importance that was missed. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:20, 11 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I have to say that last was really something! How on earth...  But great.  Apologies to all due here, have been largely absent for last week but started with a good run through my watchlist, and now back to Irish Writers special list. SeoR (talk) 14:14, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Project banner and Template:WPBannerMeta
I just noticed that the WikiProject Ireland was converted by to use the new(ish) WPBannerMeta template, which is intended to standardise project banners.

This standardisation seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice it had the highly undesirable effect of removing the link to the /Comments pages on article talk page (I only noticed it when I wanted to add a comment on my assessment of William Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby). I haven't checked the other effects of the change, but I would like to review them to see what they would be.

I will leave a message for Happy-melon to ask her/him to discuss this here. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi, and sorry for inadvertently damaging your banner! In my rollout of WPBannerMeta I've come across many projects which have features in their banner which are either undocumented, unused, or both, primarily due to the traditional practice of WikiProjects stealing banner code from each other and changing "Project X" to "Project Y" with complete disregard for what the code actually does!  Yours, for instance, is only the third project out of the 40 or so now using WPBannerMeta which actually uses the comment system, although a good half the banners I've converted had the necessary code in there somewhere.

Usage

 * I'm glad you see the advantage of the meta-template, and of course I wouldn't want needed functionality to be lost in the transition. The code above would restore the banner to the meta-format, while including a note along the bottom about the existence or non-existence of the comments page.  It also incorporates a recent new feature of WPBannerMeta, and fixes a mistake that I inadvertently made when doing the conversion the first time :D.  If you've got any other questions, comments, or suggestions, I'll be watching this page for a while. Happy‑melon 15:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, why are there so many substituted WikiProject Ireland banners floating around? I've desubstituted at least a dozen already, including the one at the top of this page, because they're clogging up Category:WikiProject banners, but I hope there isn't a reason for them to be static... Happy‑melon 15:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Any comments? Happy‑melon 19:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what is being proposed here. Sarah777 (talk) 09:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Basically, a couple of days ago I converted, the project's talk-page banner, to use , which is a meta-template for banners like this. The change was reverted because it removed functionality which WPIRELAND (unlike most other projects) actually use.  The code above is a version of WPBannerMeta which includes support for the comment system, which I offered here for discussion per WP:BRD.  As no objections have been raised, I have now copied the code above to the live version of the template. Happy‑melon 13:04, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * So long as no previous functionality is lost there does not seem to be any objection. If we are losing something, then no. ww2censor (talk) 13:55, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

(deindent)I have just been through it in a little more detail, and noticed that there were slightly fewer options offered for variations in spelling (eg. class=categ, rather than just cat or category), so I have amended Template:WPBannerMeta/fullqualityscale to add the extra permutations.

However, we have lost other functionality.
 * no longer works
 * appears to be unsupported

Please can those features be reinstated? Thanks! -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:27, 12 April 2008 (UTC)


 * After I saved my comments, I noticed another problem at the bottom this page: the red-linked Category:NA-importance Ireland articles. The way we did this before was simply not to categorise such articles on the importance scale, and that's much-preferable to having an irrelevant category. Please can the categorisation of importance=NA be turned off? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:35, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Removal of functionality
I just noticed that Happy-melon was aware that these parameters would no longer supported, and simply removed them from the template's documentation.

I'm very disappointed by this, because it looks sneaky. Happy-Melon was already aware that concern had been expressed here about his removal of functionality from WikiProject Ireland, and said above that "of course I wouldn't want needed functionality to be lost in the transition". However, it's now clear that although H-M subsequently became aware that there would be a loss of functionality, H-m proceeded to remove some functions and to alter the project documentation, without even telling this project that other functions would be lost, let alone asking us if this was acceptable. There may be a case for the removal of these parameters, but it should have been discussed with this project before their removal, not left for us to figure out afterwards.

I have now reverted Happy-melon's latest change, which I don't like doing. This template is used in over 18,000 articles, and refreshing it across all those templates imposes a significant burden on the servers. The template is protected to prevent unnecessary changes, and I will ask Happy-melon not to make any further changes to the template without first obtaining explicit approval from this project. Doing so seems to be to be an inappropriate use of admin powers. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:58, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Well spotted BHG. You have better eyes than I. Protecting it seems like a good idea too for now until the code is properly checked instead of being imposed on us. Thanks indeed. ww2censor (talk) 00:10, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It has been protected for some months, so I'm afraid that the protection won't help us if Happy-melon decides to act unilaterally again. The best I can suggest is that as many editors as possible add the template to their watchlists: just use this link to watchlist Template:WikiProject Ireland. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:23, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. Sarah777 (talk) 00:39, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure you are aware that in the past the most popular way of creating a WikiProject banner was quite simply to steal another project's code and replace all instances of "Project Foo" with "Project Bar". This led to a proliferation of project banners using code stolen from other projects, often with no regard for what functionality is actually wanted or used, sometimes even with an incomplete transition from one project to another. Amongst the 40 or so WikiProject Banners that I have converted to WPBannerMeta, I have removed conditional messages that were clearly never used, because they would have broken the template if they had. I have removed conditional links to categories that simply do not exist for Project Bar, although they might have done for Project Foo. I've removed links from Project Bar's template that still point to Project Foo. All of this functionality is unused, and all that functionality should be removed to improve the stability of the template for everyone, but in most cases working out what in a banner the project actually uses is just educated guesswork. Hence the comment I've left on quite a few talk pages and edit summaries: 'if you need X and can't add it back yourself, just let me know'. I consider this to be the proper implementation of WP:BRD: I try something; if the project doesn't like it, they add it themselves if they can; or they revert, and we discuss what needs to be modified to ensure that the project can still use all the features it needs within the new framework. Why do I not ask beforehand? Well quite apart from WP:BRD and the relative inactivity of many projects, as I've explained, most members of most projects, and all the members of some projects, couldn't even tell one end of their project banner code from the other, let alone tell me whether they use parameter X or category Y, because even the banner creator hasn't written the code themselves, they've pinched it from somewhere else. Certainly this is not universally applicable - I am delighted to find that WPIreland has a number of members who know their way around their banner's functionality - but in the depressing majority of cases, as long as the banner works, for their variable definition of "works", that is the limit of their involvement with it.

So to this banner. I converted. You reverted, with a quite legitimate complaint. I provided code that would have resolved that compliant. Nothing happened. In the absence of any discussion or comments over three days, despite a deliberate bump (I even called it that in the edit summary :D), what am I supposed to conclude? So I begin the cycle again, and we are once again back to the 'discuss' stage. Yes, I have removed functionality. Yes, I was aware that it was removed, and updated the documentation accordingly (documentation which doesn't match the functionality of the template is worse than no documentation at all). Oh, so you do use the listas parameter? I salute you, as it is a useful and valuable tool... but you are the first project I have encountered which does so, despite it having made an appearance in at least five banners. No, I wouldn't want needed functionality to be lost. Unused functionality is actually worse than useless. The failure of the image-needed parameter was a simple typo (WPIreland uses image-needed rather than the more common needs-image), so my apologies for that, although I had included the functionality (I have no idea why I removed it from the documentation :D).

I do not intend, and never have intended, to "act unilaterally" or to "force a change" on anyone. If you don't want to use, all you have to do is say so, and I will come back when yours is the last project banner not to use the template (actually penultimate: WP:AERO have also implicitly 'opted out' and I did not press the matter). Don't worry about the servers: 18,000 is diminuitive compared to the changes that go on every day (your very useful edits here caused twice as many recaches). It's far more important to get things right. I am always determined to ensure that any bugs or errors are fixed as efficiently as possible. But I'm not psychic, and I'm not a project member: the only way I can find out if there's a problem is if you tell me. So, here we are at the discussion stage again. The code below will fix all the outstanding problems with the template that I am aware of, with the exception of the "NA-importance" question raised above which I do not fully understand (if you explain further, I will of course see what I can do). As I said above, comments? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 09:54, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

{{show|Code| {{WPBannerMeta |small={{{small|}}} |nested={{{nested|}}} |category={{{category|μ}}} |IMAGE_LEFT_SMALL  = 30px |IMAGE_LEFT_LARGE  = 40px |class={{{class|}}} |FULL_QUALITY_SCALE = yes |AUTO_ASSESS       = yes |auto={{{auto|}}} |importance={{{importance|}}} |attention={{{attention|}}} |ATTENTION_CAT     = |infobox={{{needs-infobox|}}} |note 1={{{image-needed|}}} |NOTE_1_TEXT       = An image is requested for this article as its inclusion will substantially increase the significance of the article. Please remove the image-needed parameter once the image is added. |NOTE_1_IMAGE      = Image-request.svg |NOTE_1_SIZE       = |NOTE_1_CAT        = Ireland articles needing images |NOTE_1_FORMAT     = }}{{DEFAULTSORT:{{#if:{{{listas|}}}|{{{listas}}}|{{PAGENAME}} }}}} {{esoteric}}
 * PROJECT            = Ireland
 * IMAGE_LEFT         = Ireland smaller.svg
 * QUALITY_SCALE      = yes
 * IMPORTANCE_SCALE   = yes
 * ASSESSMENT_CAT     =
 * ASSESSMENT_LINK    =
 * MAIN_TEXT          = This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ireland, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Ireland on Wikipedia. For more information, or to get involved, visit the project page.
 * PORTAL             = Ireland
 * PORTAL_IMG         = Four Provinces Flag.svg
 * NAME               =
 * MAIN_CAT           =
 * ATTENTION          = yes
 * INFOBOX             = yes
 * NOTE_1             = yes
 * COMMENTS           = yes

Usage
}}


 * Hi, and thanks! As an ordinary, non-script-writing user on the project, I appreciate both the purpose and the return of all functionality.  We do use image-needed, and listas, as I would have thought most would wish to.  I can only speak for myself but must support (very experienced) BHG's comment.  I really do appreciate the work on underlying systems but it is not reasonable to expect most users to "spot" removal of detailed functionality - we edit, not script :-)  So removal of, e.g. listas, should have been flagged.  But anyway, we are back in order, it seems, and good to know that banners in general will be more efficient.  Not counting NA's would be a good outcome also but in the meantime, will go on classifying. SeoR (talk) 10:26, 13 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Happy-melon, at this stage I think that the project should indeed opt out of WPBannerMeta, because the manner of its implementation has been so disruptive, and at this stage I have no confidence in its use. In particular, it now occurs to me that using WPBannerMeta means that changes to that template (or its sub-template) may have a major impact on this project, and based on what has happened so far, I have no confidence that any such changes will be adequately discussed or notified first.
 * As to what happened here: yes, you didn't get an immediate response. That's because comparing two very complicated templates is a complex job, and it takes time ... and in the meantime this project had to deal with a period of disruption by a sockpuppeteer. You weren't to know that, but instead of asking again, you ploughed on.
 * What particularly concerns me is that you were aware that the  parameter was part of the template, and that it was documented, but you removed it anyway, because you simply assumed that we didn't use it.  You could and should have asked first rather than assuming, and even if you felt that the assumption was justified, you most definitely should have notified us that an apparently unused-parameter was removed, rather than sneakily removing it from the accompanying documentation. Don't assume: ASK.
 * You cited WP:BRD, and that worries me. You really should urgently read WP:BOLD, which stresses that "the admonition "but do not be reckless" is especially important in other namespaces" and that "Being bold in updating or creating categories and templates can have far reaching consequences".
 * I am now very concerned about the effect of this on other projects whose members do not include anyone who understands the template's functionality. You may well be right that "in the depressing majority of cases, as long as the banner works, for their variable definition of "works", that is the limit of their involvement with it" ... but if that is the case, you should take great care to explain precisely (in layman's terms) the intended effect of your changes, and specifically ask members to check for any possible ill-effects. I will now raise this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council, to warn other projects of the likelihood of undisclosed effects of your sneaky changes to project templates. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:52, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * If that is the consensus of the project, rather than one dissatisfied editor, then of course I shall "not make any further changes to the template"; as I have said, I have no intention of "forcing" any unwanted changes on anyone. It is clear that we have significant disagreements in editing philosophy, but I must take objection to BrownHairedGirl's persistent accusations of "sneakiness".  My relevant edits are here, clearly indicating that functionality was removed, and then the template and the documentation. I would suggest that the accusation would be more appropriate if that last edit were labelled as something like "tidying" or "typo", rather than a clear explanation of what was being done.  I encourage editors to make up their own minds based on the hard evidence, and not be influenced by either of our perspectives.  Everyone is of course welcome at WT:COUNCIL, but I assure you that the meta-template was developed with the council's support. The benefits of a widely-used meta-template for a diverse but similar group of templates such as WikiProject banners are many and varied, and the majority of perceived problems, when considered from a wider perspective, are actually helpful acts of standardisation.  Anyway, I wish you good luck with your project; happy editing! <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 15:47, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * To be honest Happy-Melon, you have to admit the edits to the banner have been disruptive, and without someone of BGH's experience around here, the few other active assessment editors might not have caught the problems your edits caused. I, and I assume the rest of us other than BHG, certainly don't have the experience to understand the scripting you are doing, so even if you show us the edits you made, the documentation or the template, I for one, don't know if it is good, bad or indifferent. I have no problem in your revised template being implemented across the projects so long as no functionality is lost to the current status, but to just dump it on us and let us figure out if there are problems is not good enough.  I suggest that in future, after you work on the coding, explain what you have done here and ask if it is ok to do a test for any new function you have implemented, changed or removed, then we can agree to test it and if it is ok, then we can agree to go forward or revert if necessary, if you have still not retained everything we need and use. So, for me, I would say work on, but don't go changing our template with discussing it first here. BTW, telling us that in the end, even if we are the last holdout, it may be forced onto us is not the wikiway - remember consensus! Cheers ww2censor (talk) 16:29, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I can admit that disruption has been caused by this incident, and I am sorry for my part in it. I'd say that the worst of said disruption was due to the jumping back-and-forth between converted and unconverted versions of the template, when in fact all the (legitimate) issues were easily solvable. When I encouraged other editors to look at my edits above, I was more thinking of just the edit summaries: does an edit entitled "removing unsupported parameters" from documentation constitute "sneakily removing [them]"? I think not, but I encourage you to decide for yourself.  But that's by the by now. And sorry if you misinterpreted my comment about coming back: that wasn't what I meant at all! I have no more intention of forcing it on you when you're the last project than I do now; I just meant that I'm quite happy to prove BHG's concerns about the template wrong by successfully implementing it on 1600 other banners - if you still don't want it, then you needn't have it.  As I've said above, the code in the collapse box will implement WPBannerMeta for  and mimicking (as far as I can tell) the old banner's functionality exactly.  If you want to use it, use it.  If you don't, don't :D <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 17:41, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * H-m, I'm sorry, but I stand by my description of what you did as "sneaky". You have taken a bit of a drubbing here, and I do want to thank you remaining so polite and responsive in the face of so much complaint. (not many editors manage that, so it's a big and sincere thankyou!) However, while I really do not suspect at all that you have acted in bad faith, I do think that the problems here arise from you being reckless and insufficiently communicative about your edits.
 * You point out that your edit to WikiProject Ireland/Project banner had a clear edit summary, and that's entirely true: it was not a glib "tidyup" or anything like that. However, that edit summary was the only indication anywhere that functionality was being removed, and it would not be noticed by most editors. Most of us have no reason to have that page on our watchlists, and I spotted it only because I checked Template:WikiProject Irelandtemplate after finding that   was broken and after a lot of scrutiny I happened to notice that it was no longer in the documentation.  Only when I then checked the revision history of WikiProject Ireland/Project banner then did I notice that the   parameter had also been removed.
 * The problem with WPBannerMeta and its sub-templates is that while they are in theory a good idea, they are also a very complicated bit of template syntax, with no comments in the code to explain what's going on, and even their use is very complex (I do have some experience of templating, but I'm a long way from being an expert). Unless we invest a lot of time in understanding those templates, we have to rely on you to explain clearly what the effects of their use will be ... and the reason that we had two reverts is that you didn't explain before those intended effects beforehand. I am also still concerned at the way you are emphasising the word "needed" when you say that you "wouldn't want needed functionality to be lost", I quite agree the un-needed functionality may have its downsides, but the problem is that you have been assuming that you are in position to judge whether the functionality is needed, when your judgement calls in that respect have twice been found to be wrong. I don't expect you to be able to guess that sort of thing with 100% accuracy, but my complaint is you shouldn't assume that either &mdash; you should ask in advance.
 * That's what I intend to raise at WT:COUNCIL. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:41, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that comment, it is honestly appreciated. I think I've shot myself in the foot by hanging on to the "needed" quote too long, when a better phrase would have been "wouldn't want used functionality to be lost".  Of course whether or not a project needs a particular function is not for me to decide.  What I'm having to do when converting banners is work out whether or not a project is actually using the function, however extensively.  Obviously, if the parameter categorises into a category which doesn't exist, or a link leads to a project department which was never created or is a placeholder, then that's easy to work out.  Other cases are more difficult to determine, and as you say, with something like listas, where it's almost impossible to work out where or whether it's used, perhaps I should be more cautious.  In the majority of cases, I am able to match the functionality of the old and new banners precisely, so any changes are merely cosmetic.  But each is an individual case, and yes, where dubious functionality is removed, some advance warning might be appropriate, assuming there is anyone there to read it. Oh and I assure you that the WPBannerMeta code looks a lot better in an editor that doesn't linewrap :D. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 19:29, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for keeping talking! I have few more comments.
 * I take your point about the distinction been unused and un-needed, but I'm still concerned about your approach to unused parameters. It seems to me that if I understand your interpretation of "unused" parameters correctly, they come in two different sorts:
 * those which are included in the documentation, but not in the template code
 * those which are omitted from the documentation, but included in the template (whether or not they actually work)
 * The problem is that in both of those scenarios, the parameters may nonetheless have been "used", in the sense of editors adding them to tags on articles. They may not be working, but they have still been used by editors unaware of their current futility.
 * Unfortunately, this actual usage can't be measured directly if it produces no output. The only way that I can see to test for actual usage it is to modify the template so that the parameter does generate some output (e.g. a link to a non-existent page with an obscure name). This may reveal that a parameter has been deployed on articles, and if properly implemented could immediately generate some useable data.
 * Either way, though, my point is still that you should always ask before removing. It doesn't take long to write a quick message for project saying "your banner has a wibble" which [doesn't actually do anything/isn't documented/appears not to have been applied to any templates] (delete as appropriate). That way, the project members can make the decision, and that's my concern here: these decisions should be made by the project whose template is being modified.
 * It's important to remember that the purpose of parameters in project banners is as an assessment tool. They are unusual templates, because they aren't much use on their own (other than as an advertisement for the project); their value is overwhelmingly in their role in aggregating data, and that data is only produced through an awful lot of hard work. By speed-reading and careful use of scripts, I have managed to get my assessment speed down a lot, but on average it's still well short of one-article-per-minute. Even this small project now has over 16,000 assessed articles, and that represents a huge investment of time by editors. The data is really only useful when aggregated, so editors who assess individual articles are making a leap of faith that each bit of data they enter will form part of a useful whole. If parameters that could help are not being used, the project members should be told; and if parameters which have been painstakingly entered are not having any effect, then the project members should know, so that they can either stop wasting their time, or else have the feature fixed so that they can make use of all this painstakingly-created data. Please, do start working with projects and helping them to make these decisions, rather than just making them by yourself. You obviously have a lot of expertise in project banner templates, and if you shared that expertise you'd find yourself being welcomed rather than growled at :) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:40, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Operation Banner
I have just tentatively assessed Operation Banner as mid-importance, but I wonder if it should have been high-importance.

It's British Army's term for the 1969-2007 deployment of troops in Norrn Iron, which was clearly an exceptionally important episode in the history of Ireland (whatever view anyone holds of its merits). However, it's not widely known under that name, which was why I didn't give it a higher rating.

Any thoughts? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:16, 20 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't think anybody ever heard of "Operation Banner" until they announced its ending two years ago, and the first time it was on the front pages was last year when it actually ended. I suspect the term will become more common as it becomes part of history.  I'd like to see the article expanded - considering they were there for 38 years there's nothing about what they actually did - but either way I would agree with you that its importance is high.  Scolaire (talk) 09:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)


 * While I'd never heard of the name "Operation Banner" we were all aware that since 1969 they had been conducting a violent campaign against the Nationalist Population of NI - so it's high importance whatever they called it. Sarah777 (talk) 19:27, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I'll increase it to High-importance.
 * BTW Sarah, shurely you mean that they were protecting safety and liberty of the said people???? -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:12, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Now now! Shurely you don't actually think that that is what I mean?!! :) Sarah777 (talk) 23:35, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Did you check those links, Sarah? (hint: they are piped!) -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
 * LOL! Sarah777 (talk) 08:34, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Tiocfaidh ár lá
I only noticed this edit when somebody else updated it this morning. I'm not sure the "Tiocfaidh ár lá" school really belongs in that particular project ;) Scolaire (talk) 09:10, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Oooooops! My mistake, now fixed. Thanks for pointing it out. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC)