Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life/Newsletter/003

ideas for this issue

I'm planning on having a roundup of where the ToL project/subprojects stand in terms of relative WikiWork (hence the table that is already there) but don't have any ideas for a second story yet. Enwebb (talk) 18:33, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

There's a lot of subprojects though, so that would have to be the main focus of this issue. It'd have to explain what wikiwork is too. Do you think the issue should include an update on the WP:BIOL revamp? Starsandwhales (talk) 19:16, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Starsandwhales I don't want to spend too much time on WP:BIOL (outside of how it pertains to ToL) and I had a paragraph about them last issue. I also know that users at WP:BIOL are talking about starting up their own newsletter. Related to the WikiWork status roundup, I didn't plan on writing more than what's already there (I put up a paragraph earlier today). So there's definitely room for a second feature, in my opinion. Enwebb (talk) 21:40, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Probably worth noting that Beetles and Lepidoptera having the highest WikiWork of ANY WikiProjects (technically Holidays and Lists are higher, but Holidays 6.00 WikiWork appears to be bugged, and list class articles appear not to count at all). Plantdrew (talk) 17:57, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Plantdrew interesting! I can get to this later today but feel free to add in yourself if you desire. Enwebb (talk) 18:09, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

editor spotlight?

Hey NessieVL would you have any interest in doing the editor spotlight this month? I notice you've been doing a lot of work with Rater and people might be interested in learning more about that. Let me know and I'll put together some questions. Enwebb (talk) 02:40, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Sure, I'd be honored. Though I am not involved in the maintenance or creation of the rater tool, just a heavy user. --Nessie (talk) 02:54, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

NessieVL yeah definitely! I'm guessing people don't care *that much* about the nuts and bolts of how it works (at least I don't!), but it might be nice to share some insights about why you take time to reevaluate article quality--why it matters. Also that would tie in nicely with the first story about relative wikiwork across ToL subprojects. I'll probably ping you some time tomorrow when I come up with some questions here! Enwebb (talk) 03:01, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

questions

@NessieVL: I am not an expert interviewer! If there are things you want to talk about that I didn't ask or questions you think should be tweaked, go ahead and revise. I'm going to try to get the newsletter out this week some time, so you don't need to rush. Enwebb (talk) 03:02, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Hopefully I didn't ramble too much. Feel free to follow-up. --Nessie (talk) 19:19, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

NessieVL looks like you trailed off at the end for question 2? I'll read through more thoroughly today and see if follow-ups are warranted. Enwebb (talk) 19:41, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Oh of course I did. Well anyway now I think I went overboard with it. --Nessie (talk) 02:57, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

NessieVL I put some mark up where I trimmed your answer a bit for question 2 and I've put the questions and responses into the draft. Give it a look over and see if it looks good to you! Enwebb (talk) 21:48, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Enwebb i didn't fine-tooth comb it, but it look great. If people want the unedited they can look here, so don't worry about cutting things out. I went long so you could decide how to edit it. --Nessie (talk) 22:37, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

1) How did you come to edit articles about organisms and taxonomic groups?

The main force, then and now, driving me to create or edit articles is thinking "Why isn't there an article on that on Wikipedia?" Either I'll read about some rarely-sighted creature in the deep sea or find something new on iNaturalist and want to learn more. First stop (surprise!) is Wikipedia, and many times there is just a stub or no page at all. Sometimes I just add the source that got me to the article, not sometimes I go deep and try to get everything from the library or online journals and put it all in an article. The nice thing about taxa is the strong precedent that all accepted extant taxa are notable, so one does not need to really worry about doing a ton of research and having the page get removed. I was super worried about this as a new editor: I still really dislike conflict so if I can avoid it I do. Anyway, the most important part is stitching an article in to the rest of Wikipedia: Linking all the jargon, taxonomers, pollinators, etc., adding categories, and putting in the correct WikiProjects. Recently I have been doing more of the sticthing-in stuff with extant articles. The last deep-dive article I made was Karuka at the end of last year, which is a bit of a break for me. I guess it's easier to do all the other stuff on my tablet while watching TV.

2) Many editors in the ToL are highly specialized on a group of taxa. A look at your recently created articles includes much diversity, though, with viruses, bacteria, algae, and cnidarians all represented—are there any commonalities for the articles you work on? Would you say you're particularly interested in certain groups?

I was a nerd from a time when that would get you beat up, so I like odd things and underdogs. I also avoid butting heads, so not only do I find siphonophores and seaweeds fascinating I don't have to worry about stepping on anyone's toes. I go down rabbitholes where I start writing an article like Mastocarpus papillatus because I found some growing on some rocks, then in my research I see it is parasitized by Pythium porphyrae, which has no article, and how can that be for an oomycete that oddly lives in the ocean and also attacks my tasty nori. So then I wrote that article and that got me blowing off the dust on other oomycota articles, encouraged by the pull of propagating automatic taxoboxes. Once you've done the taxonomy template for the genus, well then you might as well do all the species now that the template is taken care of for them too. and so on until I get sucked in somewhere else. Course now I am connected in with the greater ToL community myself, so I've learned a lot. I think it's good to advocate for some of these 'oddball' taxa as it makes it easier for editors to expand their range from say plants to the pathogenic microorganisms of their favorite plant. For example, I worked a bit on getting {{Virusbox}} up and running so now viruses and other non-cellular life forms have an automated taxobox. So even though virus taxonomy is a little different from that of cell-based taxa, there's less of a hurdle for editors who aren't virologists to write an article about a virus.

My favorite clades though, It's hard to pick for a dilettante like me. I think it varies by taxonomic rank, I guess. I like working on virus taxonomy, but I can't think of a specific virus species that I am awed by. Maybe Tulip breaking virus for teaching us economics or Variola virus for having so many smallpox deities, one of which was popularly sung about by Desi Arnaz and then inspired the name of a cartoon character who was then misremembered and then turned into a nickname for Howard Stern's producer Gary Dell'Abate. Sorry, really had to share that chain, but for a species that's not a staple food it probably has the most deities. But anyway, for having the most species that wow me, I love a good fungus or algae, but that often is led by my stomach. Also why I seem to research so many plant articles. You can't eat siphonophores, atleast I don't, but they are fascinating with their federalist colonies of zoids. Bats are all amazing, but the task force seems to have done so much I feel the oomycetes and slime moulds need more love. Same thing with dinosaurs (I'm team Therizinosaurus though). But honestly, every species has that one moment in the research where you just go, wow, that's so interesting. For instance, I loved discovering that the picture-winged fly (Delphinia picta) has a mating dance that involves blowing bubbles. Now I keep expecting them to show me when they land on my arm, but no such luck yet.

3) I noticed that many of your recent edits utilize the script Rater, which aids in quickly reassessing the quality and importance of an article. Why is it important to update talk page assessments of articles? side note: from the Rater edits you've made that I've looked at, I notice that the quality rating you assign often aligns with ORES. Coincidence? If not, maybe would be good to work your use of this script into your answer.

I initially started focusing on WikiProject talk page templates because they seem to be the key to data collecting and maintenance for articles, much more so than categories. This is where you note of an article needs an image, or audio, or a range map. It's how the cleanup listing bot sorts articles, and how Plantdrew does his automated taxobox usage stats. The latter inspired me to look for articles on organisms that are not assigned to any ToL WikiProjects which initially was in the thousands. I got it down to zero with just copypasta so you can imagine I was excited when I saw the rater tool. Back then I rated everything stub/low because it was faster: I couldn't check every article for the items on the B-class checklists. Plus each project has their own nuances to rating scales and I thought the editors in the individual projects would take it from there. I also thought all species were important, so how can I choose a favorite? Now it is much easier with the rater tool and the apparent consensus with Abductive's method of rating by the pageviews (0-9 views/day is low, 10-99 is med, 100-999 is high...). For the quality I generally go by the ORES rating, you caught me. It sometimes is thrown off by a long list of species or something, but it's generally good for stub to C: above that needs formal investigation and procedures I am still learning about. It seems that in the ToL projects we don't focus so much on getting articles to GA/FA so it's been harder to pick up. It was a little culture shock when I went on the Discord server and it seemed everyone was obsessed with getting articles up in quality. I think ToL is focusing on all the missing taxa and (re)organizing it all, which when you already have articles on every anime series or whatever you can focus on bulking the articles up more. In any event, on my growing to-do list is trying to get an article up to FA or GA and learn the process that way so I can better do the quality ratings and not just kick the can down the road.

4) What, if anything, can ToL and its subprojects do to better support collaboration and coordination among editors? How can we improve? side note: I'm bringing this up because of what you wrote at the WP:BIOL discussion, but we can scratch or modify this question

I mentioned earlier that the projects are the main way maintenance is done. And it is good that we have a bunch of subprojects that let those tasks get broken up into manageable pieces. Frankly I'm amazed anything gets done with WikiProject Plants with how huge its scope is. Yet this not only parcels out the work but the discussion as well. A few editors like Peter coxhead and Plantdrew keep an eye on many of the subprojects and spread the word, but it's still easy for newer editors to get a little lost. There should be balance between the lumping and splitting. The newsletter helps by crossing over all the WikiProjects, and if the discord channel picked up that would help too. Possibly the big Enwiki talk page changes will help as well.

5) What would surprise the ToL community to learn about your life off-Wikipedia?

I'm not sure anything would be surprising. I focus on nature offline too, foraging for mushrooms or wild plants and trying to avoid ticks and mosquitos. I have started going magnet fishing lately, more to help clean up the environment than in the hopes of finding anything valuable. But it would be fun to find a weapon and help solve a cold case or something. Nessie (talk) 19:19, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Color of numbers in table

The color gradient is cool on the Relative WikiWork table, but it's not clear to me why the color of the numbers changes between 5.56 and 5.57. Thanks, SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:24, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

SchreiberBike I won't admit how long it took to do that color gradient! It came down to a visibility thing. As the background colors got darker, black text became harder to read. Enwebb (talk) 21:26, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Cool! It looked like a lot of work. I thought the color of the numbers might indicate something I was missing, but that works too. SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:29, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks again for the copyedits! Should be able to get this issue out before too long, hopefully. Enwebb (talk) 21:35, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

I've had a go at creating the start of a template that might be able to automatically generate the gradient ({{color scale}}). Still has a few bugs but should give the idea! For example:

{{Color scale| value = 4.0 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}
{{Color scale| value = 4.5 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}
{{Color scale| value = 5.0 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}
{{Color scale| value = 5.5 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}
{{Color scale| value = 6.0 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}
{{Color scale| value = 6.5 |Rmin=7|Rmax=4|Gmin=7|Gmax=0|Bmin=4|Bmax=30}}

produces #FF6D00 #D45B04 #AA4809 #7F360E #552413 #2A1218. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 01:09, 4 July 2019 (UTC)