Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Organizations/Archive 1

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 22:47, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Items for organizations
The following needs to be put in for each organization, IMO. They are name, established, list of presidents, list of awards (including winners), list of publications, headquarters, list of conferences, list of executive directors (vice presidents), and official websites. Chris 16:03, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, a good idea to create a standard for organization articles (I couldn't find discussions yet on this topic, must I think there must be some..). I created a new subproject to centralize discussion and added your contribution: Formats for organization articles. Brz7 23:57, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Preamble
Some time ago, I had began envisioning building an online network of local groups and organizations in my city. Recently, it has become increasingly clear to me that I would need to compile and catalogue a list of all the relevant unions, associations, societies and federations in order to move forward. I had installed my own MediaWiki, but through a combination of my lack of programming skills and repeated bot attacks, I was forced to put that integrated project on hiatus. I began to focus more on my day job, and life moved on.

Wikipedia
Over the last couple of days I started to realize that the benefit of having such a list of local groups would be of more benefit to my community as a whole, than any single project that made use of it. I began to wonder if there weren't others in my city and in other places around the world, that wouldn't enjoy researching and collaborating on localized groups.

Existing Framework Lacking
I started drafting out some goals and objectives for a WikiProject, which mainly pointed out that the existing 'framework' consists mainly of two monolithic categories within the society portal. Both the clubs & societies, and the organization categories have been developed from the top down, as opposed to bottom up from the grass roots.

As a result, I found that there is only one categorized Alberta Organization, and no category for any communities within my province. The picture looks a bit better at the national level, but stubs and other incongruities abound.

Organizations vs. Groups
I had tentatively used the name WikiProject Organizations, on my user space where I was drafting this plan, and then switched it to WikiProject Groups after discovered this project had already been started last year. The reason why I started the Groups WikiProject, was that my plan was far more ambitious than what had been laid down already, and I didn't want to ruffle any feathers.

However, in consideration of the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, I knew that if I presented a clear and reasonable enough justification, I would more than likely be given a nod from the users that spawned the page.

Primary Objectives
To catalogue and organize localized listings and categories of associations, societies, unions and other non-profit groups in communities around the world. Form and update templatesfor each type and region, as well as create guidelines for article sections and info boxes. The end product of which will be a stable and growing Organizations Portal.

Manifesto
The main point of contention I have with the current framework is that it is cumbersome and overtly top-down in it's classification and structure. This does not bode well for the end-user or first time visitor to wikipedia who is looking for groups and organizations in their community.

Therefore, I propose that we model this project in a modular and scalable way that allows for members to focus on their own community or region in tandem with others. For example, there would be room for separate task-forces for each nation, state, province, region, and city all accessible from the front page.

This WikiProject, then becomes a resource for standardized article guidelines, infoboxes, boilers and other templates, for anyone who wishes to work on their own community or do research on others. It will be important initially to develop rules for categorizing international and intraregional grassroots organizations. For example greenpeace should be listed as an international or ubiquitous organization, but should also have national and local offices listed where appropriate, (linking up and down).

I will start by developing this specific framework for my communities of Edmonton, Alberta, and Canada, and hopefully along the way, will have ironed out a system that can be applied and easily extended by other contributers for their own cities and regions.

For clarity, I don't think that location and geography should be the only categories for organizations, not least of which because I'm fairly sure they are already prevalent on Wikipedia. Rather, the primary method of navigation and classification should be based on where they are located, as there are hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world, and it would be totally unrealistic to access them mainly through lists and lists of lists.

i.e. In my city alone there are probably 350+ local student and labour unions. Is the best way for someone to find them reading through a list of tens or hundreds of thousands of unions from every nation and city around the world? Obviously not. The emphasis on building from local upwards will create a meaningful and structured tree of articles and categories.

As this project evolves and grows, local organizers will have an increasingly powerful resource for outreach, cooperation and consensus building amongst their peers and related organizations around the world. In anticipation of the potential of this turning into a large project with many contributing members, we should look to the structure of the Military History WikiProject for guidance. I envision our local and regional task forces and other process to be arranged in much the same way.

As we move forward, I appreciate all feedback and input to improve the effort and product of this Project.

Comments & Feedback
All input is appreciated here. Don't forget to sign ( ~ ) and use colons to indent your responses. Thanks in advance. Oldsoul 21:45, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Hello Oldsoul, you're more than welcome to join the WikiProject! (Just had an edit conflict and then saw you created this section) Indeed, there are millions of organizations which would need to be made accessible in a convenient way. The geographical proposal you made definitely makes sense. Look forward to see that developing: please add an open task/project on the front page. BTW the future goal of the WikiProject goes beyond the primary objective you mention above (To catalogue and organize localized listings and categories of associations, societies, unions and other non-profit groups in communities around the world.) but this sector covers indeed a large part of all organizations. Best regards, Brz7 21:51, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Greetings Brz7, thanks for the warm welcome! We can certainly have a debate in the near future about the different categorization schemes currently in use in the organizations category.


 * Basically I see this WikiProject as focusing on two separate areas. One is developing the system I've outlined above which allows the hundreds of different localized organizations to be added in a meaningful way - on the bottom of the tree. The second is getting the existing organization articles and sub-categories to fit into the final scheme we decide upon, from the top down.
 * Edmonton & District Soccer Association is an example of a local organization article that has been started and should be conformed to the new classification standards; whereas:
 * ACLU is an example of a fairly ubiquitous organization and well-developed article that would fit into our second area of focus.


 * Again, we should look to the military history project, and compare their category scheme with ours.


 * There's simply no comparison. We need not follow exactly that example, but we should bear simplicity and clarity in mind while moving forward. I expect to be adding lots of stuff to the front page over the next 6 to 8 hours.Oldsoul 22:50, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Good to see the WikiProject gradually being transformed to the new project structure! For now I have not yet spend time to know how to implement this so you're welcome to do the overhaul. I'm mainly interested in discussing content issues related to organizations :) (e.g. categorization schemes)
 * As far as the scope of the project is concerned I think an explicit reference to the various sectors of society (Referring to the initial objective of the project: "Create a comprehensive overview of notable organizations in society sectors, i.e. civil society, business government and media.") makes it clear that we deal with organizations in general. What wording of the scope do you propose? I think it would be an idea to create general taskforces: Business organizations task force, Government organizations task force (e.g. expand and improve Category:Ministries (goal: include all ministries categorized by country/portfolio)), Civil society organizations task force, Media organizations task force. Let me know what you think! Best regards, Brz7 14:12, 31 January 2007 (UTC)