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::But some projects might not have any articles that are "high-need". [[User:Maurreen|Maurreen]] 19:08, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
::But some projects might not have any articles that are "high-need". [[User:Maurreen|Maurreen]] 19:08, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

:::Yes, you're right, certainly when the releases are small. Clearly a project like History would produce far more top need articles than the (inactive) History of Poland project. It would be the job of the projects to assign their relative importance ''within that subject area'' - then our job here to assign the importance ''as a whole''. So we might pick the top ten from the Poland group, but the top 500 from the history project. Any thoughts on how best to do that - to reconcile the ranking of "high" from a project with our judgement of "low" importance for the subject as a whole, without upsetting the low-ranked WikiProjects? [[User:Walkerma|Walkerma]] 01:35, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Revision as of 01:35, 24 April 2006

This is the main discussion page for the Work via Wikiprojects part of the Wikipedia 1.0 project. Please leave comments below.

WP1.0 editorial team discussions – Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions

Wikiproject CVG

We've started compiling a list of articles that we feel would be essential to have. Is there some sort of roadmap regarding this project? Jacoplane 03:29, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for letting us know, your worklist looks to be very helpful for us. This part of the WP1.0 project is fairly new; the closest thing to a roadmap was laid out when I originally proposed the idea here. We are currently in the process of contacting all active WikiProjects to find out what they have available, or can put together in the next few months. Most WikiProjects don't even have a formal list of articles at all, and almost no one has assessed their articles, though often subject experts can give us some good key articles. WP:Chem have a large worklist, and a couple of other groups have started similar things recently. We will definitely keep track of your page, particularly once we have a date for publication.
My own guesstimate (nothing more!) is that we will have something ready to publish by autumn 2006. I think it will be more like Wikipedia 0.9 than 1.0, because many important articles will have to be omitted because of poor quality, and our subject coverage will be patchy. The new Wikisort system of article assessment by users may well revolutionise things and allow us to identify many more good articles. However my own feeling is that peer review by subject expert Wikipedians (as you are doing) is still the best way of assessing articles. Even aside from WP1.0, I think it's a very worthwhile thing to do, and at WP:Chem it has served to mobilise the chemists around article improvement. Thanks for getting in touch, and good luck! Walkerma 05:29, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies

I just stumbled on this page. While you haven't contacted our project yet, I thought you might be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject UK Parliament constituencies/Progress, which gives an idea of the status of articles - those rated three or four out of four with results completed are generally our best articles. Warofdreams talk 13:20, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! I just added your WikiProject to our contacting list last night, so I was taking a look at the project, but I didn't see the progress page. I'll take a look soon. Thanks, Walkerma 14:55, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Arab-Israeli conflict

Note that Six-Day War is detailed and referenced, and Yom Kippur War is a FA. 216.196.152.59 02:03, 2 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info, these are nice articles. Walkerma 06:46, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Albums

You may want to look here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Albums/Featured_Albums_Project for well-written album articles. In addition, Smile (Brian Wilson album) by the Beach Boys is a featured article. Gflores Talk 00:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for this, it looks like a really useful list, exactly the kind of thing we need. Walkerma 06:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A similar page... Portal:Music/Featured_articles. Lists Music related featured articles. Gflores Talk 19:10, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What a great idea for a page! Maybe we should start a similar one for science FAs. Thanks a lot, Walkerma 01:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Automation

Any hint of how to automate assesement? I'd like to have some simple "ticky-marks" to check-off on a page. In other words, I'd like to have a way of declaring "I agree with this assesment", or "I disagree", and also have a way of seeing how many other editors reviewed the given article, and what thier votes were. I'd also like to see the grand-total list of articles from my project. At this time, its not even clear where the current assesment, if any, can be viewed. linas 19:20, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The automation side of WP1.0 is on the Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Wiki_Sort project (sister to this project), this user-based assessment is supposed to come in early next year according to Jimbo's interview for Nature yesterday. This project involves contacting WikiProjects one by one, and asking the people there for their assessments. For example, people at Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics are much more able to assess your article on Wave-particle duality than I am, so we ask for their opinion. There are only two (very busy) people working on this project, so it's taking some time to process all the WikiProjects, but so far we've contacted all of the Economics ones, and many of the Arts and the Humanities ones. If you click on the links near the top of the project page, you'll see the five categories listed, for example the Arts WikiProjects; you can see that only about half of the projects have responded. A typical discussion is this one. We'll probably contact the Science and Technology WikiProjects in January. If you'd like to help with the work here, we'd love to have you join us...! Cheers, Walkerma 01:24, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To do (Feb 2006)

There isn't a formal TODO, Shanel & I have just sent messages now & again. This message was written originally as a personal message, but as it got long I posted here for other folks who may join us. Maybe this will act as an informal to do list. At the moment the main tasks are

  1. Complete the listings of projects.
  2. Contact all the WikiProjects listed. We always label the posting "Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project" so the link from our assessment page goes straight to that section of the talk page. If you want to contact a few, take a look at some of the postings Shanel & I have done. They have generally had a fairly standard intro which includes a link to the assessment criteria, then we tailor it a bit for the group we're addressing. We often mention their FAs or some articles that look like poss A-Class to get their interest, and so they know it isn't spam. If it's a really big group like Military History, you might ask if they already have a worklist -that worked well this week, they basically said "No, but we'll start one" and we could potentially get hundreds of assessed articles for WP 1.0 from that worklist! When you contact a group, mention the date of contact in the relevant section.
  3. Check the groups you have contacted. Sometimes you may want to add something to your original posting -encouragement, ideas, etc. Then (when you get time) tabulate the articles and their assessments in the appropriate section of our assessment page (such as WPHobbies). Often the project will just list some articles they like, and you have to do the A/B/Start stuff yourself. Some groups get back to us on the WP1.0 talk pages, make sure you log that in our assessment page.

Shanel & I have talked about re-contacting some of the groups we originally contacted in October. Myself, I think we may want to try different approaches, and in a few cases maybe contact folks on their personal talk pages. Some other tasks that will arise once we finish are how to organise the listings we have, and to integrate them with core topics. I see it as a hierarchy, with core topics at the top (level 1), and many of the WikiProject suggestions are down at around level 3 or 4. (Maurreen & I spoke about this, she sees it the same way). You can look at my test page if you like (try clicking on the down arrows to find the lower levels and reach say an article on iron(III) oxide). I'm trying to make the hierarchy a little more tangible to help organise the topics more clearly. We have to make sure that we cover the level 2 ones, and make sure everything fits well together without huge gaps, IMHO. I also strongly agree with your opinion about WP1.0 helping to focus attention on improving quality in articles, particularly in the major topic areas. Thanks again, Walkerma 07:58, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe, it looks like Gflores is on a roll today! I agree with everything Walkerma (Mr. Martin? ;) ) has said. I think some Wikiprojects may have even gone inactive since we contacted them, so contacting people on their talk pages is a great idea. I noticed that some Wikiprojects overlap quite a bit. Someone on Wikiproject Theatre, for example, listed a FA that was listed on Wikiproject Opera's page! So, perhaps we could also try contacting similar Wikiprojects if a Wikiproject seems to have become inactive or hasn't responded. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shanel (talk • contribs)
Should sub-WikiProjects be contacted as well. For instance, there's the Chemistry WikiProject and Isotopes WikiProject as a descendent project. What about the geographical projects? Contact all that are active? Gflores Talk 20:33, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, you are on a roll! It seems like you just pushed the project about two months ahead, thanks! I like your inclusion of the GA idea into the posting, it's something people are now getting used to, and it approximates to our A-Class in most cases. You're right about similar projects, we heard nothing back from WP Albums, then WP Music supplied us with a nice list of albums they are working on! We should go to an similar but active project if needed. I think we should contact both the "mother" and the "daughter" projects. The chem ones are very familiar to me, since the majority of my wikiwork is coordinated through those two projects. In fact WP Isotopes and WP Elements tend to be pretty independent of WP Chemicals and Chemistry most of the time, they focus exclusively on the elements and many of them are physicists with no interest in the chem side of things. We do talk to each other a bit, but I don't even know if either group has a worklist. Yes, I think we should contact all the active "places" projects. Maurreen envisions a simple atlas as part of the WP1.0 release, which I think is a great idea - I suspect the places articles are likely to be second only to people articles in terms of popularity, and there are LOTS of them! I can't thank you enough for all the work you've done in the last couple days, Gflores, and I'm sure Shanel would say the same. Walkerma 21:38, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging B-class articles

Is there a proposed mechanism for tagging b-class articles? The Category:Mathematics might have several thousand of these; I think that it would be a lot easier if we could add a B-class template to an article talk page, and having that template auto-include in a category, than it would be maintaining a list by hand. Right? linas 04:44, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My experience was at WP:Chem, where the worklist tracks 380 articles regularly, and that system has worked very well there, but we haven't handled thousands of articles. There isn't a mechanism such as you describe, though it was recently proposed on the main project talk page. For your situation I can see the attraction. One problem is that the B-Class status needs checking (in my experience in chem, at a minimum of every 6 months, preferably every 2), and without an active list the temptation might be to let the assessments stay - but I think you could build a system that deals with that. Of course here at WP 1.0 we are facing the problem of handling many thousands of assessments. I have been hesitant myself on this, mainly because I was the one who proposed the A/B/Start/Stub system in the first place, and I didn't want to be seen to be "foisting" this scheme onto everyone - but it does now seem to be gaining some general acceptance. And your method is certainly an easier way of handling them! I'll try to raise this topic again. Cheers, Walkerma 05:51, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
FOLLOWUP. I posted comments here. I also solicited comments from the Military history project, like you they have thousands of articles to deal with, and they recently started a worklist using the A/B/Start/Stub system. Walkerma 06:15, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Horrible idea, in my opinion. With a worklist, it's easy to keep track of WHO has given an article certain ratings; with a talk-page template, we'd have to deal with articles appearing in the category at random, with no assurance that they had actually been looked at by a member of the project. —Kirill Lokshin 14:21, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ahh, OK. That's a good reason. I was looking for some way of simplifying/automating. I'm intimately familiar with a few hundred articles, I was hoping to avoid the tedium of editing a long list. linas 19:55, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, WikiProject Tropical cyclones has found the category system to be the most effective, as it is a general agreement that when editors work on particular articles and want to raise their ranking, they make a listing at a subpage, where it is decided whether to push it up a notch or not. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 01:15, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lists

Are we including Featured Lists in the worklists? WP Final Fantasy wants to know. Gflores Talk 16:21, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer IMHO is YES, include lists. In important question! In theory, the FAs First people would be dealing with that, and so they should set the policy. In practice I think we need to track FAs on a project-by-project basis here too. When Maurreen & I discussed this, we both thought that some lists and other "non-articles" are going to be an essential part of WP1.0. For example I listed a few lists in the WikiProject Elements & Isotopes listing yesterday, because these projects often deal with things like periodic tables or isotope charts which are "must-haves" as far as I am concerned. Walkerma 18:58, 3 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Regional Notice Boards

The recent post on the main WP1.0 talk page (here) alerted me to the existence of these groups, that I was blissfully unaware of, yet they will be extremely useful to us for locating articles on places (see this list). I will also be useufl for Core Topics, providing expert review of articles we locate through the "Core Topics Plus" articles, as Core Topics broadens to include countries and perhaps major cities, etc. The starting point for a list would be this category listing, I will add a new listing of these to cover our contacts with them (if people are OK with that). Walkerma 22:07, 4 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Contacting science WikiProjects and stuff

Hi, I'm going on the road for a few days, so could I ask one of you guys to check up on the science contacts we made? Lots were contacted on March 9th, but with many there's been no contact with them since - I don't want them to think we're just spamming them. Sometimes our contacts trigger people doing a lot of work compiling lists (e.g., the astronomical objects people are putting a worklist together), we need to show we appreciate their work! I've checked in with all down our list as far as the chemistry/geology list, but sections 5 (Computer Science) onwards still need re-contacting.

Btw, Titoxd, I really like your latest iteration of our contact message, I'll start using it when I next do contacts (I think we need to contact the regional notice boards). Those contacts and the "Places" listings that Titoxd contacted (thanks!) are probably going to be particularly important if the Geography project gets going. Also, Btw Shanel, I have downloaded the automation software you mentioned to speed up the contacting - now I've just got to learn how to use it. Thanks, Walkerma 16:41, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, no problem. I'll go contact them regularly, as I'm member of a science WikiProject myself. If you need it, my message is available at my Project sandbox, so you can recycle it and adjust it as you see fit. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 18:49, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot!This sort of thing is typical. Walkerma 19:43, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am going to borrow Titoxd's template, but for my part, it'd be the arts. —Mirlen 13:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not all Wikiprojects have been contacted!!!

At least one wikiproject I know of, Wikipedia:WikiProject Stargate has not been contacted, and is not on the list. Please refrain from saying that you have contacted all projects until you actualy have contacted them. Either contact the rest or don't say you have contacted them all thnaks. Tobyk777 01:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That goes the same for Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle-earth. However, being a member of the wikiproject, I can contact them. —Mirlen 13:06, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I contacted WikiProject Middle-earth, so I am going to go ahead and add it to the list. —Mirlen 13:22, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I also contacted Stargate. I'm going to leave the one or more remain message, just in case there's a few more there we didn't reach. —Mirlen 15:19, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the thing is that we use the list at List of WikiProjects, which is slowly getting out of date. I asked Interiot if he could run a query to find most WikiProjects, and here's the results, which we may want to use to weed out inactive WikiProjects. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 20:14, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

1.0 "Release Version Qualifying"

Hi. I'm interested in feedback on Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Release Version Qualifying. It's essentially an idea to use a process similar to WP:FAC to identify and handle articles and lists that would go in a release version. Maurreen 18:30, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiprojects and core topics

Please see note at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. Maurreen 17:54, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is this a good place to suggest articles?

Hi, I remember you came to WikiProject Comics a while back, and I meant to get round to responding and never did. What have you got for comics articles so far? Steve block talk 20:05, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at the WP1.0 comics article list, and please add to this! The discussion is archived here. We will be contacting you again soon, asking for a list of major comic topics. Thanks! Walkerma 22:09, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New contact with projects

Following on from discussion on the main WP1.0 talk page connected with meshing this project with topics, we were planning new contact with the WikiProjects. Tito had suggested the wording be something like:

Hello! We had previously contacted you to identify the quality articles in your WikiProject, and now we need a few more favors. If it were possible for you to revise the Core Topics list, to identify the articles that should be included in a small CD release due to their importance, regardless of quality. We will use that information to assess which articles should be sent to collaborations for improvement, as well as to help you identify which articles are the most important for you. As well, we ask you to keep updating your WikiProject article table for articles of high quality. Thanks!

I would propose something like the following altered version, but read my comments below too, it will need some revamping.

Hello! We had previously contacted you to identify the quality articles in your WikiProject, and now we need a few more favors. We would like you to identify the "key articles" that should be included in a small CD release due to their importance, regardless of quality. We will use that information to assess which articles should be sent to collaborations for improvement, as well as to help you identify which articles are the most important for you. As well, we ask you to keep updating your [[Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject full article list#Wikipedia:{{{{{1}}}}}|WikiProject article table]] for articles of high quality. Thanks!'

I am proposing we consistently use the term key article to indicate that it is one of the most important articles from that project - this suggests some importance, though to a lesser degree than core topics or vital articles.

Some other issues to resolve before we start sending this message are:

  • We need to make sure our last set of contacts have been followed up on, and the tables updated accordingly. Thanks, Tito, for all your help with this recently, I really appreciate that.
  • We need to update our listing of projects to contact. Again Tito has been great, getting a script written to get us up-to-date.
  • We need to consider how many articles we want projects to send us, because otherwise we may get 100 postings on our personal talk pages saying "How many?" This may have to be resolved ny classifying the projects as top level like History, which could be asked to supply a worklist of 100 articles, where something lower down like Polish history (inactive?) would be just asked for a top 10 or 20. The "top level" projects could also be asked to look at core topics articles in their field, whereas lower level projects would not (they typically won't cover such broad subjects).
  • For simplicity, I would like to keep all of the articles from one particular WikiProject together. That will mean revising the tables slightly to include some way of indicating whether something is a key article or not. However, once done it will be much easier for us to keep track and also for the projects themselves to start editing.
  • I think we should encourage groups to edit their own tables as much as possible, as the proposed contact post suggests.
  • We need to have a consistent name for the post. The word "collaboration" was added to some later posts, and this broke the links from our WVWP pages that are labelled "Contact with WikiProject:Sea Urchins".
  • Is it possible to use transclusion for our tables? Tito, you seem to know a lot about this kind of thing, and the cyclones project seem to do things like this - can you work wonders once again? It would be really good if we could automagically list and count our A or B-Class articles, and even better if we could automate things such that other WP1.0 lists (perhaps things like this tree could be updated as the assessments are updated. Currently, if an article like Australia at the Winter Olympics gets upgraded to FA (as it was recently), we have to locate the project table (in hobbies, Aussie sports) and manually change it. Then we have to go manually into the list of A-Class articles and change it. Think about it - even if just 150 projects (out of 700) provide us with 20 articles each, we will have 3000 article to try to monitor with about 4 people! I was also thinking about seeing if we could do something like this at WP:Chem with their worklist.

Comments? Walkerma 05:20, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well, I'll try to address each point at a time:
    • Wording: I just proposed a draft, and I like your wording too. I'm just curious: if an article is identified as a "Key" article, should it be indicated on the WikiProject's table (e.g. Tropical cyclone for WikiProject Tropical cyclones)?
    • Contacts: I've tried going through the list frequently, at least for Science and Places, but a double-check would sure help. One thing I've noticed, though, is that some WikiProjects don't reply, while they are obviously active. What do we do in those cases?
    • List: Unfortunately, as the Toolserver has stopped replicating the English Wikipedia (long story, hopefully it will be fixed soon) it has caused the script to be out of date. Either way, it is considerably newer than the list we're using, and we need to go through those and add them to the tables.
    • Depth of lists: I'm not completely sure I agree with this one - I'd like all articles that are of extremely high quality to have a shot at being in 1.0. Also, asking top-level WikiProjects for more articles might make them reluctant to provide them, as they would feel overwhelmed by the task.
    • Simplicity: That can be done fairly easily: write Key article on the comments section, or italize the entire row in the table, or add a top row, like this:
Contact with WP Cyclones
Key Article Date Assessment Comments
Tropical cyclone April 18, 2006 B Assessment subpage
Article Date Assessment Comments
1928 Okeechobee Hurricane February 25, 2006 FA Featured article
Cyclone Tracy October 6, 2004 FA Featured article
Galveston Hurricane of 1900 September 2, 2004 FA Featured article
... ... ... ...
    • Title: Agreed, and that one was my fault. I did that template before I noticed that we were using a particular title in the WikiProjects' talk page, but not until after I had contacted about 50 of them.
    • Transclusion: That is fairly difficult. Currently, WP:TROP uses a hybrid template/category system; the assessment is included as a conditional parameter for {{hurricane}}, and it has gradually been expanded to include assessment scales, assessment notices, collaboration notices, and merge notices. To change the assessment, someone needs to change the class parameter of the template, which then changes the respective subcategory of Category:Tropical cyclone articles by quality. That's as much as we can automate it, I think; I cannot think right now of a method that would allow us to read the template in the article's talk page and automatically update the table, besides getting a bot to do it, which isn't a bad idea. If I recall correctly, Mathbot does something similar for WikiProject Mathematics. That way, we could get most of the articles organized quickly; the only caveat is that the format of {{hurricane}} would have to be more widespread.
  • Any more questions? Titoxd(?!? - help us) 06:06, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll leave the details to you guys, but I just wanted to say that I like and appreciate the direction you're moving in. Thanks. Maurreen 16:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea a lot. Should we start contacting the WikiProjects? —Mirlen 17:26, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's better to go through checking that the WikiProject we've contacted already haven't added new things to their talk pages, and if they have, to copy them to the table. Then, we can start checking Interiot's report, and after that, we should begin Round 2 of contacts. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 21:34, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated the template, by the way. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 00:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've also gone through the Places, Technology and Science lists, and the only one that needs to be updated is WP Game theory. I'm short on time, and it's a long list, so if anyone wants to take it, that would be very helpful. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 00:27, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Now done - the game theory listing on EconBusiness has been updated (I think Game Theory appears in several places, we need to cross link these to avoid asking for info they've already given us. This also highlights another issue - when we do the request for a list of key articles, some groups like this one have already in effect done so, we may want to use a different message for these groups. (I think we need to try to automate this process for efficiency, but we don't want it to end up just annoying people like spam. Right now we have the trust and support of many of the projects, we need to maintain that.) Walkerma 05:25, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I had just removed Game theory from the Science listing, right before I saw this note. I guess that leaves Arts, Hobbies and Humanities to double-check, as I've double-checked the other four pages now. As to your question - if a WikiProject is ahead in assessments or has provided key articles on their page, it basically means a template can't be used, agreed. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:32, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lists?

This is just food for thought ... at some point it might be good to ask them about the best or most important lists. Maurreen 16:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Asking another favor about sending in some of their best lists or key lists that are in need of collaboration. --Mirlen 17:27, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's the plan! Walkerma 19:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Associate membership?

I was thinking of maybe being an associate member, for country and continent (possibly more later). OK? Maurreen 15:49, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, we can use all the help we can get. With you coordinating the Geography project, it would be great to have you do at least some of the "Places" contacts personally. Thanks, Walkerma 14:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wishlist on organising the information with transclusion

I have been trying to rack my brains and come up with ways we can organise our information in more useful ways. What I would like to see would be a system whereby:

  1. Data by Assessment We could easily find all of the articles within a given quality category (A-Class or whatever), and count them. Ideally we would even be able to organise them into categories, so we could have something like this list, but generated automagically. That way if User:Joe Smith from WikiProject:Herbaceous borders (i.e., not one of us) went in and changed the assessment rating of the article Gertrude Jekyll from B to A, it would automatically appear on the list of A-Class articles (in the right section?). If this were done properly, Joe Smith could edit the WikiProject's worklist and then our listing would also change, along with the list of A-Class articles, and perhaps a listing in Core Topics or Vital Articles too.
  2. Data by article We should also be able to ask the question, "What is the assessment of the article on DNA Resequencer?" and get an answer quickly and easily. Ideally we should also be able to get other data such as WikiProject, date of assessment and comments (data we currently record) as well as importance of the topic and possibly category (data we may be recording in the future). One simple way of doing this would be to generate lists of articles in given fields, ideally as an article tree like this one (only much more slick!), and have links to the appropriate place in our assessment tables. Perhaps a better (but challenging) way for the long term would also involve automagic, we could have a set of templates where we give it the page name, and out come whatever metadata you need. In other words, you type {{Assessment|DNA Sequencer}} and it would deliver the variable "A-Class." This would be extremely useful for things like the article trees, where in place of a link to the article alone we could have a link to the article in a colour representing the assessment (Oh, it's red so it's a stub, sort of idea).

I am very limited in my technical skills with transclusion - I can only work on the principle that if I keep typing I will eventually get something that works. Well, almost, anyway - at least you can take a look. I have created a template for A-Class articles called {{User:Walkerma/Sandbox}}, and used it in this test table for listing the A-Class articles. It does require reordering the info to put the assessment in the first column. I think it's very easy to use, so Joe Smith can easily see how to edit the listing for Gertrude Jekyll, and it was easy to change the table from our current style. The only problem was that the comments column didn't come out, I don't know what I'm doing wrong there. Well, actually I just don't know what I'm doing, period. I have produced this just to show the sort of thing I am thinking of for item 1 (data by assessment) on my wishlist above.

Please give comments, and if you know how to produce the relevant automagic I will be spellbound! Or perhaps you can see other things we need to have, or better ways of achieving 1 & 2 from the above list. I would like to resolve this and build in the automation all now, before we start asking the projects for more lists, because once we have several thousand articles listed it will be very hard to change the system. Walkerma 05:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It can be done, at least some of it. Let's follow how Tropical cyclones does this:
  • All articles from the WikiProject contain the {{hurricane}} template, which contains an optional parameter, class. If the class is defined, the template calls on another template to display the assessment (e.g. Hurricane Nora's assessment is B-Class).
  • The {{hurricane}} template contains a category that is automatically updated; a bot can be programmed to grab the category daily and make any changes if necessary. You may want to ask Oleg Alexandrov for help, as he programmed Mathbot to produce things like these.
  • Also, the inclusion of the {{B-Class}} template triggers an event that is recorded in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:B-Class. As you can see, Hurricane Nora is listed down there with (inclusion) after the name. That can also help making lists of articles.
  • However, making assessments by article is incredibly difficult. In order to be able to grab that data quickly, we might need something along the lines of article validation enabled, as there is no way a template can use information in the database not passed as a parameter. Perhaps the folks at the Village Pump may have ideas, but I seriously cannot think how (perhaps the category scheme and a Toolserver account may even be needed). Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:27, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Tito, that's very helpful. I've tried understanding how WP:Cyclones do this and I end up going round in circles, but perhaps you could set up the templates for us to do that. For the data by article, one thought that occurred to me was that we could maybe insert a category onto the article page itself that says Category:WP1.0 Places {{WP1.0 Assessment}} or somthing like that, which would place it in a category such as Category:WP1.0 Places A-Class. A couple of things would be needed to make this workable, though:

  • Make it so that the category can be read from the assessment
  • Make the category invisible to someone reading the article, it would only show up while editing part, but it could be read by bots and the like. (Is that what noinclude does?)

Is that a workable method? Walkerma 05:41, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, as you can see, that's similar to what WP Cylclones does, because we include assessment categories inside {{hurricane}}, and it produces subcategories of Category:Tropical cyclone articles by quality. Categories cannot be hidden, the only thing noinclude does is that it prevents categories from being included when a template is transcluded, to categorize the template page itself. Let me go grab a copy of the template and dissect it... Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:45, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Here it is:
{| class="messagebox standard-talk"
|-
|[[Image:Hurricane Andrew Landfall.jpg|center|50px|Hurricanes]]
| align="center" | ''This article is part of [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones]], a project to systematically present information on [[tropical cyclone]]s and storm seasons. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit the article attached to this page (see [[Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ]] for more information).''

Introductory information, links, pretty much what the ordinary WikiProject templates do. 

{{#if:{{{class|}}}
  |
{{!}}-
{{!}} {{{{{class}}}-Class}}
{{!}} align="left" {{!}} ''This article has been rated as {{{class}}}-Class on the [[:Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment|assessment scale]].''
}}

This part receives the class parameter called from the page; it displays the appropriate class template on the screen, and marks the inclusion of the template in Special:Whatlinkshere. 

<!--
-->{{#if:{{{assessed|}}}
  |<tr><td>[[Image:Exquisite-kfind.png|28px|center|Peer review]]</td><td align="left">This article has been [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Assessment#{{PAGENAME}}|assessed]] by editors of the WikiProject.</td></tr>
}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{merge|}}}
  |<tr><td>[[Image:Merge-arrows.gif|48px|center|Merge talk]]</td><td align="left">The possible merging of this article has been [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Merging#{{PAGENAME}}|discussed]] by editors of the WikiProject.</td></tr>
}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{TCCOTF|}}}
  |<tr><td>[[Image:Crystal 128 kdmconfig.png|28px|center|Collaboration]]</td><td align="left">This article has been selected as the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Collaboration|Tropical Cyclone Collaboration of the Fortnight]].</td></tr>
}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{TCCOTF-old|}}}
  |<tr><td>[[Image:Crystal 128 kdmconfig.png|28px|center|Collaboration]]</td><td align="left">This article has been previously selected as the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Collaboration archive#{{PAGENAME}}|Tropical Cyclone Collaboration of the Fortnight]].</td></tr>
}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{TCCOTF-nom|}}}
  |<tr><td>[[Image:Crystal 128 kdmconfig.png|28px|center|Collaboration]]</td><td align="left">This article is a current nominee for the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Collaboration#{{PAGENAME}}|Tropical Cyclone Collaboration of the Fortnight]].</td></tr>
}}

This part adds merge, collaboration and assessment notices in new rows, which helps avoid using additional templates. 

|}<noinclude>
[[Category:Hurricane templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:WikiProject banners|{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Templates using ParserFunctions|{{PAGENAME}}]]
</noinclude><includeonly>{{#switch:{{{class}}}
 |FA=[[Category:FA-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |A=[[Category:A-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |B=[[Category:B-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |Start=[[Category:Start-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |Stub=[[Category:Stub-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |Dab=[[Category:Disambig-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |Template=[[Category:Template-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |Cat=[[Category:Category-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |=[[Category:No-Class hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 |[[Category:Unassessed hurricane articles|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 }}</includeonly>

This part is the magic part: It receives the class parameter from above, and if the parameter matches a pre-set expression (e.g. class=A, it lists it on Category:A-Class hurricane articles. The noincludes are used to prevent Template:Hurricane from being categorized into the assessment categories (and to mark the Template page with particular categories), and the "includeonly"s to guarantee that the target pages are categorized by assessment only.

Does that help? Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is helpful, I have the general idea now, and it sounds like something along these lines would be excellent for this project. Is there a way to generate a worklist-type list of the type we use here (or its equivalent? In other words, could we generate a table of all the Atlantic hurricanes that lists them by year and includes the assessment in the table along with the date of assessment and the comments? Thanks, Walkerma 06:14, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Since we pretty much didn't like worklists (or no one proposed them), we just stuck to the category system. There's two ways I can think of doing so: through CategoryTree (but it needs some modifications to the tool to work), or by a specially-programmed bot that does so. By year, there could be some cross-category listing with Category:Tropical cyclones by season, but that might be two different tables altogether. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 06:27, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been asked by Titoxd to comment here. I am not very sure I understand in detail what you guys are planning in here, there is a lot of complicated stuff to read in this page, but if you need a bot to crawl through a list of categories and generating some lists/reports based on some criteria, I could do that. If you want the bot to also edit a lot of pages, that is also doable, but would require user supervision obviously. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:44, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly, yes, crawl through categories, and fill out a template parameter based on the results of the crawl. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 00:48, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Got it. Again, appears doable, but if you want the bot to daily modify some template(s)/articles, somebody's got to watch over the changes everyday to see if the bot did not screw anything up (bugs happen, server problems sometimes, etc). User supervision would be the hardest part. Once it is decided what precisely you want to, I could work on it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:56, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. We'll discuss it some more here, and we'll contact you back, ok? Thanks! :) Titoxd(?!? - help us) 00:58, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand the technical stuff fully, but if it means what I think it does, then it is excellent! Can you clarify/comment on some things for me?
  1. We need to make sure that whatever system we use is easy for the Joe Smith from a typical project (mentioned above) to go and add a new article or change an assessment in that table EASILY. Viewed from "Joe's" perspective, would this type of edit be easy?
  2. A result of #1 would be that if possible IMHO we need a bot (or something) that changes the category to match the worklist entry, rather than one that changes the worklist entry to match the category. If this isn't possible, we'll manage, we'll just have to make it clear in our posting to the projects that they edit the category, not the table.
  3. Will it mean us having to add a WP1.0 category for every article on our lists? We may get some flak for this, people will complain we are "spamming" Wikipedia with "pointless categories." There is a small minority of people who are strongly opposed to WP1.0 for some reason. If there is some way to add a "hide" command to the cats it would be nicer, but if not, we'll live with it.
Please can you comment on the above? However, even if we can't do any of the things I list there, the benefits of this automation are huge, and personally I'm extremely grateful to both of you (Tito & Oleg) for taking the time to look at this. I'm really glad we have people working on WP1.0 who understand the more sophisticated techniques. As far as I can tell, this will allow us to move from handling a couple of hundred articles with a month or two lag time, to handling several thousand articles with only a day or two's lag time. Exactly what we need! (If I'm misunderstanding things, please tell me!) Oleg, I think we can set up people to monitor the changes, at least every couple of days if not daily. Thank you so, so much! Walkerma 03:34, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(\r) The change would be quite easy to do; just like replacing Start-Class for B-Class in an article's talk page.

As for making the bot read the tables instead of the category pages: Oleg was a bit concerned about checking for errors when the bot writes to a page. Making a bot read the categories and write to the article assessment tables makes it easier to spot errors by the bot via watchlists; unfortunately, there's no way to "watch" a category for additions, so it would be harder to check that way, as edits would be scattered among perhaps thousands of talk pages.

But yes, with this method it is necessary to have categories. However, the categories would be put on talk pages, like the rest of Wikipedia meta-data. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 03:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, and I take your point about the problem of spotting errors. Talk pages are definitely less intrusive, I had forgotten that Cyclones uses the talk pages rather than main articles. I think "Joe" could easily do that. This all sounds like it will be very effective, thank you again! Walkerma 04:20, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I was bold and picked a few WikiProject templates to use as testbeds for this expansion. Currently, WikiProject Tropical cyclones, WikiProject Chemistry, WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject Meteorology use will use the expanded templates, then if it scales, I'll begin adding the optional parameter for more projects. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 01:25, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have seen the future for WVWP, and it looks like this!

Need: The article's importance, regardless of its quality

Top Subject is a must-have for a print encyclopaedia
High Subject contributes a depth of knowledge
Mid Subject fills in more minor details
Low Subject is peripheral knowledge, possibly trivial

I got very excited when I stumbled across this Math worklist being created for WP1.0. I was first pleased just that the project was putting together a list for WP1.0, then I get very excited when I saw that they also include a column in their table for Need, defined as "The article's importance, regardless of its quality". They have created a lovely set of templates in various shades of purple to indicate this, shown left. Are they psychic, or are they just reading the postings on this page about requesting lists on importance? This seems like a very simple system that anyone could understand. I would like to suggest that we use their system as a model, and use their templates too. We should

  • Incorporate "need" into our tables as a column, just like they do, and
  • Request all of the WikiProjects rank not only the quality but also the need.
  • Use the term "key article" for all of the "Top-Class" need articles.

Comments, anyone? (By the way, Tito, I will get onto checking our other project contacts tomorrow night, I just wanted to get all this stuff on the table, no pun intended). Walkerma 05:24, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, this has a lot of potential.
As food for thought, possibly the topics in the current core list would be in the "highest-need" class, and so forth. Maurreen 18:10, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
But some projects might not have any articles that are "high-need". Maurreen 19:08, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, you're right, certainly when the releases are small. Clearly a project like History would produce far more top need articles than the (inactive) History of Poland project. It would be the job of the projects to assign their relative importance within that subject area - then our job here to assign the importance as a whole. So we might pick the top ten from the Poland group, but the top 500 from the history project. Any thoughts on how best to do that - to reconcile the ranking of "high" from a project with our judgement of "low" importance for the subject as a whole, without upsetting the low-ranked WikiProjects? Walkerma 01:35, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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