Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

WikiProject Minnesota

I think we have enough interested editors to do some reviewing etc. How do we get started? -Ravedave (help name my baby) 01:58, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Great! Take a look at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot, set up the basic categories then tag a few article talk pages. A suitable model to use might be Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Virginia articles by quality, which seems to be going well thanks to a very experienced coordinator (he even wrote an AWB plugin to help!). If all goes smoothly, Mathbot should pick up your project then (later) the articles on its next sweep through (usually done every night, Minnesota time). If that test works then you can start in earnest with your assessments. Let us know if you hit any problems along the way, and in the meantime I'll look out for the Minnesota project appearing in the main listing. Thanks again and good luck! Walkerma 03:15, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Cool I got it figured out I think, take a look: Category:Minnesota_articles_by_Importance and Category:Minnesota_articles_by_quality am I missing anything? I hijacked our existing wikiproject template so there are like 400 uncategorized articles. -Ravedave (help name my baby) 04:57, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Looks fine, though I think it missed tonight's bot run - watch for it tomorrow night! For the category by importance page I'd suggest putting in the table from here rather than the quality assessment template. Other than that I think it all looks hunky dory! Cheers, Walkerma 06:12, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology/Assessment

Hello! I have gone so far as to create Wikipedia:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology/Assessment. What do I do now? Is this the point you come in? Inge 09:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I missed this query when it came in, I was away and off the internet when you contacted us, as were some others who often answer in my absence. Anyway, you seem to have got things running very nicely there; just ask here if anything arises, and I will normally reply in a day or two. Having looked at your list I have one question for you- I posted a question about references in your top-level article, heraldry some time ago but this hasn't yet been resolved. If someone from the project can help with this we can add the article into Version 0.5. At present I think it would be an automatic fail for GA or FA on these (admittedly rather technical) grounds, a shame for an important and otherwise nicely written article. Thanks, Walkerma 01:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Stagecraft Assessment Help

Hi, I'm looking to set up some sort of assessment for the stagecraft wikiproject. I was hoping to do it similar to the novels project assessment and I was just wondering if someone might be able to help me do that. I don't really know where to start and any help I could get would be great. Thanks! Lekogm 16:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Organized Labour/Assessment. If that's close enough I can probably help set it up for you.--Bookandcoffee 21:44, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah that looks pretty good. I already have started working on an assessment subpage. I tried to create all the categories on my own and somehow screwed that up. Any help you might be able to give would be apreciated. --Lekogm 06:12, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
To prepare that area of Wikipedia for Mathbot to assess, take a look at the [[instructions on using the bot. You'll need to set up a few categories, (one for each assessment level) and place these in Category:Stagecraft articles by quality, and put that category into the main Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments category. Tag a few articles and away you go! The importance categories are done in a similar way - if people don't get upset about their articles being tagged as "low importance" (or you can call them "low priority") these are helpful in making sure the key articles float to the top of the lists. Let us know if you need more help. Walkerma 02:04, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I tried all that and somehow managed to screw up the categories. The template wanted to use a category that I didn't create even though I had created it already, so now I have double categories. Not gonna lie, I'm pretty lost. --Lekogm 06:12, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, it's the old upper case/lower case problem that is such a nuisance on Wikipedia. No harm done, and the bot picked things up just fine. You now have a list! I reassessed the stage lighting article as a B (for GA it needs to be passed at WP:GA), we can see if the log picks up the change tonight (it should appear in bold). Then we just need to ask an admin to delete the "Stagecraft Articles" categories and keep the "Stagecraft articles" categories, and then you can start assessing! Let us know if you need more help. Walkerma 15:39, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Awesome, I used the GA assessment as a test to see if it worked and I forgot to change it. If things don't seem to go well after the bot updates tonight I'll come back and let you know. What's the best way to get an admin to delete these empty categories? --Lekogm 17:09, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

None of the Start class articles were added by the bot. All the code appears to be correct. Is there any reason this would have happened? --Lekogm 12:30, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

They seem to be there now - I guess you fixed the problem! Let us know if there is anything wtill wrong. Cheers, Walkerma 04:36, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Here's my new issue. I have 110 articles/pages with the banner on them, but the bot only lists 97 articles. Any ideas? --Lekogm 19:27, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

It could be either a cache delay, in which case it'll update itself in a day or two. Alternatively, it could be caused by the server error that occurred recently that made some bots go haywire - thankfully Mathbot only misbehaved a little. See the recent comments below. If the problem persists, let us know one or two of the articles that aren't showing up and I'll try to see what's wrong. Walkerma 05:30, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

WP:WVWP and the release version (WP:WPRV)

Once WP:V0.5 and WP:WVWP are complete, this project could put some of its articles into WP:WPRV (release version). Otherwise, there would be no use for this project. What do you think? Eyu100 23:26, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Multiplication scale

Once this project is almost finished, articles could be put into the release version like this:

  • Quality:
  1. FA-Class is 7.5
  2. A-Class is 6.5
  3. GA-Class is 5
  4. B-Class is 4.5
  5. Start-Class is 4
  6. Stub-Class is 2
  • Importance:
  1. Articles that are needed for completeness will have their importance rating doubled
  2. Top-importance is 7.5
  3. High-importance is 6
  4. Mid-importance is 4
  5. Low-importance is 2.5

The rating of an article is its quality rating times its importance rating. Articles which have a rating of 20 will automatically be included in the release version.

NOTE: the minimum rating can be increased to get better articles (at the expense of quantity) or decreased to get more articles (at the expense of quality).

Any thoughts? Eyu100 23:39, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

This scheme does look to be well thought out, with numbers picked to match with our general aims. If we want a large-scale release, we definitely need some automation. You can see how much time the two of us have spent reviewing in the last week, we couldn't possibly cope with a list of 20,000 articles! We definitely lose something when we do this, because some Start-Class articles are nicely written but incomplete (as with Luxembourg (city), but others are much longer but are very poorly written/organized. There are many article, though, which can be included without much debate.
Importance is a much more difficult thing to handle, because (a) everything is relative and (b) the majority of projects don't record it in their bot lists. I think we will need to classify the importance of WikiProjects ourselves, just into broad levels, but we won't be able to do detailed rankings without everyone hating us! Clearly an article that is Top importance in WikiProject USA is a lot more important than one that is Top in WikiProject Texas, and that in turn is more important than one that is Top in WikiProject Dallas. But how do we compare one that is Medium in USA, with one that is High in Texas, Top in Dallas? Not easy. To muddy the waters even more, I've found that some projects use the importance rankings as we specify them (i.e., as meaning importance within the project) but a few tend to alter it to compensate for the importance of their project (e.g. the Thomas the Tank Engine project puts nearly all of their articles as medium or low, because they recognise the more specialised nature of their project). Even with two projects that are apparently at an equivalent level - pop groups - most people would consider a Top importance Beatles article more important than a Top importance KLF article. I think again the solution is to automate the obvious cases, and then review the more debatable ones manually.
WVWP is currently generating two sets of lists. (1) The bot-generated lists obviously dominate, and provide us with a huge resource. However, we can't use only those lists, because we can't force projects to use the bot, and therefore we need the manual lists. (2) The manual lists are just short, but they typically contain the highest importance & quality articles from a given project, i.e. the articles we would want to use.
Overall, I'd be OK with us testing out your proposed scheme on a subset of articles, then taking a quick manual look at what we have. The only real flaw in this plan IMHO is in the importance aspect - we might limit it to articles from fairly broad projects, where even mid-importance is equivalent to something still reasonably significant. If we are using the importance ratings from a TV show WikiProject or something much narrower, we need to scale these down accordingly, perhaps on a project by project basis. Walkerma 01:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Tito raises a good point on my talk page, a stub on a Top-Importance topic would automatically go in. I think we should have a minimum quality level of B-Class for automatic inclusion. We would review any Top-Start articles manually, and only look at Top-Stub articles that are REALLY top importance (i.e. Core topics and the like). Walkerma 01:14, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
We can tweak the numbers; I am changing Stub-Class from a 3 to a 2 (note: if the stub is required for completeness, it will be included even if it is only mid-importance). Also, if Earth was a stub, you would include it anyway even if it is not required for importance. I think we should make top-importance articles from more general Wikiprojects. Another option would be to give the actual Wikiprojects importance ratings, but that might be controversial. I tweaked the numbers a little bit. Eyu100 04:02, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
I took the liberty of asking Martinp23 if he could set up his bot to run this (or some similar algorithm). I left the formula vague for now; I envisage us testing out a sample set of project worklists, and seeing what works best. I've been thinking, we might be able to set up an additive algorithm that produces identical results to the multiplicative one suggested here, but it (probably) using much less server time. We can try a few different things, I think. Martin says he will start working on this over the coming weekend. Walkerma 02:22, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany

I just, ahem, "borrowed" the template for WikiProject Virginia to set up the assessment parameters of the new project. Please advise what else I am supposed to do. I am aware of the need for categories and will be setting them up as soon as I finish this message. Also, for what it's worth, I intend to fulfill my promise to contact the various projects as soon as the templates, etc., for the above project are set up. I figure I can advise other projects better once I know something about what I'm talking about myself. Badbilltucker 22:08, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

One thing I see, Category:WikiProject Germany artciles by importance will need to be renamed with the correct spelling of articles, I think. A more serious problem seems to be that a set of categories was created with names like Category:Stub-class Germany articles (small c), but the template is designed to place articles in a category called Category:Stub-Class Germany articles (large C). However, it doesn't even seem to be doing that, because the word stub needs to be capitalised too, as Stub! capitalisation matters, or should that be CAPITALISATION MATTERS!? I've added a comment to the bot instructions, this has happened more than once before (I've done it), indeed with the #Stagecraft_Assessment_Help question just above. I changed one class=stub to class=Stub, at Talk:Klaus Naumann, and it is now generating the correct (non-existent) category. Interestingly, the talk page templates (WP:Bio, WP:MILHIST and WP:Germany) are now more than twice as long as the article itself - something wrong there?! Do any admins know how to rename/move categories? Keep trying! Thanks, Walkerma 02:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject American Animation

Hello, everyone. I am a member of this once-nearly defunct project that I only started to revive this past weekend. In such a midst, I have created {{USAnimation}}, our project template, and have tagged up to 76 pages with it. Right now, I am also setting up the article quality category, and will fix up the template with that in mind. In a day or two, we will announce our WP:1.0 selection. So, as soon as I've straightened up everything, please let me know. --Slgr@ndson (page - messages - contribs) 23:23, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Everything looks good at this point. We'll see if the bot picks it up tonight. Thanks for reviving the project (it's been lurking on my watchlist unseen for months!), and also for using the bot! Walkerma 03:02, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
While I was typing the above, Mathbot picked up your category. Yay! Walkerma 03:03, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Problem at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Ethnic groups articles by quality

Thread moved to Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index#Problem_at_Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team.2FEthnic_groups_articles_by_quality --kingboyk 11:41, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Comics

I've set up the Wikipedia:WikiProject Comics/Article Classification and the bot has worked out some stats on the brief tagging done already at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Comics articles by quality statistics but Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Comics articles by quality and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Comics articles by quality log are redlinks. Are these bot generated or do I need to set them up manually? Hiding Talk 08:09, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

They're done automatically. They aren't redlinks to me here... Titoxd(?!?) 08:24, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks Titoxd. If I'd waited ten more minutes... Yes, they hadn't set up when I posted, and since the bot runs at three I thought they'd set up then. Apologies, I guess these bots have a lot to do. :) Hiding Talk 09:06, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:38, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Pokémon Collaborative Project problems

Sorry if this is the wrong to place, or I'm asking a stupid question, but I added the template to the talk page, etc etc, and Mathbot add the info to this page, but didn't create two of the links. Do you know what I did wrong? Cheers, Highway Grammar Enforcer! 09:50, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Now all looks good. It just took the bot six hours to get to that project, as it works on them one by one down the list. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:46, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Dogs...

Has begun assessments. Badbilltucker 14:19, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Great! I'll watch for it's appearing tonight - just watch those capital letters! Are you cooperating with the long-established Wikipedia:WikiProject Dog breeds? They have provided us here with info, they certainly were quite active. User:Elf was the contact, I think. Walkerma 16:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
We're in contact with them. They don't (yet) seem to have any objections to the existence of the newer group, and there may (maybe, sometime) be a merger down the line a little. Badbilltucker 16:57, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Beekeeping ...

Just started and wants to use the bots. Badbilltucker 01:35, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Looks like things there are under way just fine, and I know Martin is a bot expert (he's written a bot for both of us!). So, do you think we should wait & see if they need any help, or should we be more proactive? Thanks, Walkerma 07:05, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject South Dakota ...

is now set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 15:34, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot problems

Don't be surprised if things are held up for a while - Oleg reports that the "Bot went mad"! Hopefully he can fix things soon, but please be patient! Walkerma 06:44, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Question and comment

Wikipedia:WikiProject Underground seems to be doing assessments independent of everyone else. Someone else might want to contact them about whether they want to set up for the bot. And, as a member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Radio Stations, at least two members (myself and someone else) have indicated interest in setting up for assessment. I guess I'll set it up for assessment when I get my current activities finished, some time in the next millenium or so. :/ Badbilltucker 18:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, they are using the bot, and the project shows up in the main listing. However, I notice that WP:Dogs seems to have disappeared off the bot listing - what happened? Did someone vandalise the template? I'm glad to hear about the Radio Stations project, my WP1.0 messages never seemed to be received! Walkerma 04:52, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
The "dogs" came up today in the list. For some reason the bot does not always get the most recent information in categories. I plan to switch to a different way of getting info from categories as suggested by Salix alba and Titoxd at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, hopefully that will help. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:28, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada & Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion

I think these projects is set up for the bot now. On the Canada project sidebar, they had indicated that they would have an assessment department, so I just sorta created it. I don't think they'll get mad at me. Religion had no official members, so, as the first real member, what I say goes. Isn't autocracy a grand thing? :) Badbilltucker 20:25, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

New table format? Can choose to keep old one?

Hi,

If you look at the sidebar down the right side of Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic groups, the version 1.0 statistics table has kinda hosed the sidebar. The table is wider than it used to be. I looked at in both Firefox and MSIE; both look bad. Is there an option to return to the old format...?

Thanks --Ling.Nut 02:26, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

PS we may just move the table out of the sidebar, but I'd still like to know if there's an option to return to the old table format...
Thanks --Ling.Nut 02:33, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
We can't easily change this back, I'm afraid - and we thought the extra information was worth the inconvenience, since now you know (at a glance) things like whether your Top importance articles are FAs or stubs.. The only other option at this point is to widen the sidebar as they did at the India WikiProject. Walkerma 04:24, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I didn't say anything about changing the new one back, but rather about having two options.
I am now leaving comments across two forums; please forgive..--Ling.Nut 04:28, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
For his own sanity, Oleg has a pretty strict policy of having one standard system for all - customising the different features for all the different WikiProjects would be a nightmare to administer. For myself, I thank God every night that we have Oleg and his bot at all! Walkerma 04:43, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Nepal & Wikipedia:WikiProject Peru

are both set up for the bot now. Badbilltucker 19:18, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I ran the two using the brand new web-based tool documented in the instructions. The Peru project has no articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:50, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Germany/Mainz task force

Specifically requested being set up for the bot separately. I believe that it is now ready. Badbilltucker 20:13, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems to be, Munich too. Are you sure you want to maintain separate lists for every German city, though? I would've thought it better to include them all together under Germany, or perhaps German cities. I realise the Australians have separate lists for Adelaide etc, but there are only ~7 major cities there, and they have a history of strong city WikiProjects. No problem though, if that's the preference of the project. Walkerma 06:24, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Neither one was my idea, although I agree that they might be unnecesarily complicating. However, they might be useful later as examples for projects which are so large as to have markedly different importance parameters. Anyway, like I said, I didn't propose them. Badbilltucker 17:03, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Roller Coasters

I noted that several of the categories for this project were either not made or insufficiently detailed, so I tried to ensure that they were created right. I have no way of knowing if any problems were reported, but they should be gone now whether they were or weren't reported. Badbilltucker 17:05, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Food and drink

is now set up for the bot. When they will actually start using it I can't really say, but I will assess a few articles myself today. I am going to join the project to give me the bona fides to do so. Badbilltucker 22:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Abortion

Hello. I'm a member of a WikiProject Abortion. How would I and other members of this WikiProject go about joining and participating in this project? Any advice in helping to build and improve articles within our small project would be truly appreciated. Thanks. -Severa (!!!) 10:26, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

  • The best way I can think of is to read the Project Guide, which has been written primarily by people who have been among the most successful in project work, and implementing some of the suggestions there that apply to your project. Anything else I might say is probably already better said there. Badbilltucker 23:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject United States

is, I believe, set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 23:44, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Bhutan & Wikipedia:WikiProject Russia ...

are set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 21:21, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This is all good work of course, so thanks! I have a question though. Are you setting up the necessary pages because the projects asked for it, or you do it first and then you hope they will use them? That would show if the recent flurry of additions to the index actually corresponds to people assessing more articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:31, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Not so much hope. I am actually a member of both of these new projects, and created the banners with assessment parameters. I will be personally assessing most of the articles myself, as I finish the current project I am working on assessing. Regarding Asian Americans below, they specifically had on their project page a redlink to the assessment division, among several other red links. I simply filled it in for them, and created the banner and userboxes as well. I have contacted the creator of that project and informed her of this. With any luck, she will be starting assessments soon. If she doesn't, I figure to try to alternate projects to get them all assessed. Badbilltucker 16:10, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Asian Americans

is set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 16:07, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Burma/Myanmar

At the explicit request of the project's creator here, this project has been set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 23:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Freemasonry...

had been earlier partially set up for assessments. I believe it is completely set up now. Badbilltucker 01:02, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Little League...

had created the assessment project page, but none of the categories. The categories now exist, and I believe it is set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 18:14, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Louisville ...

requested set up for assessments, and now is set up. Badbilltucker 19:51, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Caribbean...

is set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 20:36, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion and Wikipedia:WikiProject Taoism ...

are I think both prepared for the bot. Badbilltucker 18:31, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Denmark...

has been set up for the bot. Badbilltucker 15:42, 20 December 2006 (UTC)