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Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Work via WikiProjects discussions – Pushing to 1.0 discussions

Garbled

I have no idea what the following means, or I would try to fix it: The core topics project is mainly working to through its collaboration to improve core articles (one to FA status) – this work continues. I deleted it principally to call it to the attention of the editor who added it, in hopes that he or she would recast it to make more sense. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 02:00, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It refers to this collaboration, which has not been very active lately. I'll try to rewrite that if things pick up over there. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Aquatics?

Is WikiProject Fishes involved? Jourdy288 (talk) 19:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Different assessment definitions

Is a project allowed to set stricter criteria than Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment, for instance requiring all B-class articles to have complete history sections (if applicable)? Thank you. --NE2 03:46, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I don't really like it, because it tends to break up a standard that has become pretty universal across the English Wikipedia (and spreading on the French one). However, I also respect the independence of WikiProjects, and I know that in the context of a particular project a slight refining of the criteria may be appropriate. A few projects, such as WP:MILHIST, have gone this route - they require adequate refs for all B-Class.

I would say that if you decide to do something on this, you should either:

Consider doing what the Math project has done, and create a B+ grade (and they even refer to history in the criteria!). This is read by the bot as a simple B, but it looks different on the talk page. This would be my preference. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment.
If you think that system won't work, then you need to make it very clear to all the WikiProject what the additional criteria are, and also make it clear that it is a little different from other projects. We have had problems at WP:CHEM (ironically, the project where the assessment scale was invented!) where someone from outside started downgrading some of our B-Class articles for lack of inline citations, because they were following the MILHIST criteria.

Bear in mind that we are testing a new selection bot for WP1.0, and this will read all B-Class articles as being of equivalent quality. That means that if you make B-Class a much smaller group than is typical, you will find fewer of your project's articles being selected. That may be what you want, if you think the "weak B" articles are embarrassing, or you may have a high standard of articles anyway across your subject area so you can be more picky (as is the case with MILHIST, IMHO).

Finally, I think in time the standards will rise. When we first started, very few articles even had inline citations! Even some FAs! When that happens (2009? 2010?) we will have to debate where to tighten things, if at all, and your input would be welcome then - tell us about how well your modification has worked, or not! Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:47, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the reply. It looks like the B+-class math articles are actually read as GA - is it supposed to be this way? --NE2 04:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting, I don't think it was always that way. They perhaps decided as a project that it would make sense. We should now be able to add "GA" as a comment into the table, for all articles that are GAs, irrespective of how they are graded. If that occurs, (when I get time to ask Oleg about it and follow through) then it would be very clear on the table which is true GA and which is B. Walkerma (talk) 05:35, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It appears that the one current issue is that B+ has to be included in another category as well. Are you saying that in the future the bot will recognize B+ as separate? --NE2 06:16, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, I don't think so, unless there is a sea change in how assessment is done; the current system isn't perfect but no alternative is either. It'd be very hard to get several hundred projects to agree to such a change, even if it was good (I'm not convinced it is good for the whole of WP)! With either the B+ option or the "B is better" option, the tables will only recognise the existing grade levels. Walkerma (talk) 19:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(←) Just to clarify the WP:WPM situation. Bplus used to be listed with B, but it was upgraded to refer to articles which are "almost GA", in the sense that they are GA quality modulo technical MoS issues, and overzealous interpretation of inline citation requirements. I would welcome the separate listing of good article status from the WP1.0 classes. Indeed these are really orthogonal assessments, one WikiProject based, the other community-wide. The image I have is

Stub —	Start —	B —	B+ —	A
			GA —	FA.

Geometry guy 00:39, 19 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for the clarification! I agree with you on GA, but the consensus was the status quo when I raised the issue last year. Walkerma (talk) 03:27, 19 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Version 1.0 template cleanup

Suggest cleaning up the Wikipedia 1.0 Projects template? box that appears on the right side of this page. Specifically, removing "V0.5 to do" and "V0.5 bot list" since the version is ended, and possibly a more general reorganization by importance....

Dialectric (talk) 17:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'd like to do that soon. I'm expecting some big new changes very soon with a new bot, and I'll probably update it after that. In the meantime, feel free to clean it up! Walkerma (talk) 19:05, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Assessing importance

We now have the raw importance output from a test run of the SelectionBot (check that link for more detail) in spreadsheet format. Once it's been cleaned up we'll start evaluating the weightings for importance (in a week or so?). If anyone here wants to help with that, please post your name here and/or email me - I'll reply in a few days. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 04:23, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming articles

I renamed Buddha (general) to Buddhahood, and am about to adjust the piped links with WP:AWB. The following pages from your project currently link there:

Would you like me to change these, too? — Sebastian 17:49, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary. All the pages you listed above will be automatically updated with the new name the next time the bot updates those data, in the next few days. John Carter (talk) 18:17, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! You may want to keep this section for a while or write a note on the project page for others who may have the same question. — Sebastian 02:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC) (I may not be watching this page anymore. If you would like to continue the conversation, please do so here and let me know.)[reply]

How to move/rename project assessments?

Project members want to merge Wikipedia:WikiProject Horse breeds into Wikipedia:WikiProject Equine and want to know how to move/rename the existing article assessments and discontinue use of Template:WikiProject Horse breeds. Is there a bot for this task? --Una Smith (talk) 15:31, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In this case a move of the existing article assessments and discontinuation of the deprecated template, Template:WikiProject Horse breeds, should be as simple as a redirect of the deprecated template. See this real assessment template, an example redirected deprecated template, and an example talk page with the deprecated assessment tag. --Paleorthid (talk) 17:33, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please let us know if that works OK in your case. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 17:36, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Article improvement for "pay"?

Maybe this is a very bad idea, but there is a current proposal at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#WikiProject WikiMoney to reestablish the old WikiMoney system. I was wondering whether anyone here knew of any way to maybe acquire funding, possibly on a fairly small level (tens of thousands of dollars US, I would think at tops), to maybe encourage people to work on some of our more important articles. Clearly, the incentives would be of "in-kind" type primarily, like tickets to events, free clothing, and the like, but it might be one of the easier ways to get significant improvement on some of the most important articles. John Carter (talk) 15:47, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was one of the judges of the Core Contest, where Danny offered $100 cold hard cash for people to improve core articles. This goal is very dear to my heart, because these articles are the foundations of a good encyclopedia and of Wikipedia 1.0 releases - hence the need for WP:CORE, WP:VA etc. I was absolutely blown away at the amount of excellent work that was done in a two-week period, it has really made a big difference. There were around 50 entries in total, and nearly all made significant improvements; in some cases people took a Start-Class to WP:GAN-standard, or B-Class to WP:FAC, which is a huge amount of work. It's left me thinking that if I have some money (unlikely soon!) I would love to do a similar thing. It achieved more in a fortnight than our own Core Contest managed in two years.

But one critical thing is WP:COI. If person X is found (say) to be sponsoring a contest that leads to an improvement (even inadvertently) in the article about their employer, there will be howls all over the community. So we can't just have the usual wikilibertarianism where anybody does what they feel like, or we'll end up destroying a potentially good idea. Even Danny was criticised severely by some for using an unorthodox method that bypassed normal methods - it seems amazing that people would complain that someone was giving money to the community, but they did. So I think it would best be done through the Foundation, which could provide the impartiality and no-COI. If we stick with a specific list of uncontroversial core topics, it'd work even better. I'll talk with Danny, and then maybe talk to Delphine or whoever is now coordinating the 1.0 efforts on behalf of the Foundation. Nice idea, IMHO, but must be handled carefully. Walkerma (talk) 16:43, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well I can't really say I support the idea, because I believe that the focus should be rational philosophical self-interest rather than rational monetary self-interest. I also think potential solutions can create major POV conflicts. But I do have a idea about Web 1.0 sponsorship. Companies or individuals who believe in the interests of Web 1.0 could donate money to a fund controlled by the Web 1.0 assessment team. The assessment team could price, pay out incentives on the articles they felt needed the most work. And split donate and pay out to editors who contributed to the articles.

Problems with this would be: # You couldn't allow companies to dictate which page got more focus or incentive (that would be a potential conflict of POV) #You would have to isolate the assessment team from the article editors to add security against money fraud, laundering, and conflicting interests. # Ethical rationale

Like I said, I don't support the idea... but (shrug) it's an idea.--Sparkygravity (talk) 16:47, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, what I was thinking about was something like the following example:

100 (random figure) wikibucks for making a release version selection article an FA. An editor who gathers X wikibucks would then be able to deduct that amount for the expenses to going to Wikimania or some similar get together. In a sense, it encourages the people who contribute the most to articles to consider becoming more actively invovled. It might also be possible in terms of allocating scholarships to such meetings. However, in some cases, the individuals involved wouldn't want to attend anyway. In cases like that, maybe create a system where, using another random figure, 100 wikibucks might be able to be used for 10 dollars value of merchandise. In effect, someone who writes two release version FAs might get a T-shirt or something. If it were done like this, the wikibucks would still be an encouragement to contribute, and for major contributors to become more involved in the project, but would still be probably inexpensive enough to not really get people writing articles with the intention of getting "paid" for their work. John Carter (talk) 16:55, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think wikipedia is moving rapidly enough without having to change tack. Sure there are weaker articles, but in the worst case scenario, the core articles will be of a high standard in say 5 or 10 years, and being able to say no money changed hands to tarnish the process, that's priceless. Pgr94 (talk) 00:11, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Although I have some reservations about straight cash (outlined above), I think John Carter's suggestion of using a free/discounted trip to Wikimania sounds like a great idea. Perhaps tee shirts etc for those not interested in traveling, or some other form of sponsorship for wiki-related activities. That way words like "cash" and "money" might even be avoided, and we can perhaps think of words like "travel grant" and "scholarship". Rather than setting up a whole wikibucks system (that foundered when they did it before), maybe it could be run as a simple competition. If it works as a one-off, it could be repeated every month, or whatever. Although Pgr94 is right in the long term, but "in the long term we are all dead" (who said that?). And unfortunately, many of the most important articles are the ones in the worst condition - look at Tool, the current Core Collaboration. Thanks for an interesting idea, John! I'm away this weekend, but I'll try and ask for opinions next week. Walkerma (talk) 05:05, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly adding Dab and Redirect articles to the assessments chart?

One of the things I look at when I look at the total assessments to date chart is how many total articles have been assessed. Right now, we are kinda short of the total number of articles out there. I'm not sure if whatever it is that counts the total number of articles that exist counts dab and redirect pages as articles, but my guess is that it does. That being the case, the assessments statistics page will always fall well short of all the articles, even if all the "real" articles actually are assessed. I also don't know if that entity counts the categories, images, templates, and whatnot, but my guess is that even if it does it can be changed not to. The Dab and Redirect pages are all in mainspace, though, so I think they'll always be counted. Would there be any objections to maybe adding those two classes to the stats page, and maybe the others if they are counted in the number of total articles, just so that we can have a better idea of how many real articles remain unassessed out there? John Carter (talk) 17:26, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't like the idea of us having to count all of the "non-articles" in mainspace, I think it would just add a lot more work that we don't need! I think we need to find out exactly what the various machine counters are counting - I think the total probably does NOT include redirects, for example. If there are non-articles that are being counted, I'd rather find a way for a bot or something to count those, and I think the whole community would want to know the true article count is. Walkerma (talk) 03:12, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Test output from SelectionBot

For those who don't watch all the obscure pages of this project, please take a look at the SelectionBot output. I've come up with a selection system I quite like, but it's very much a "first draft". I'd like to hear what others think of these ranking algorithms, which will allow us to pick articles automatically. Please take a look at the lists (ods files, I couldn't get the Excel ones to save) and give comments. Walkerma (talk) 03:23, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How are you proposing to deal with projects which explicitly don't do importance, such as MilHist? I'm a coordinator for WP Films and I'm literally a few days away from proposing the abolition of importance assessment from our banner too, in favor of a fairly small "Core" list that represents about 1% of our tagged articles. (Furthermore, arts fields like Films are more difficult to rank importance for, since there is less of an information hierarchy, so to speak - all film titles are theoretically equal, aside from personal opinions otherwise. It's not like the sciences, where certain concepts are more central than others.) Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 03:46, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We have three other methods for measuring importance - no. of views of the page, no. of links into the page, and no. of interwiki links. I prefer to have a human element in the ranking, particularly from a subject-expert, but if it's not there the other three should pick up the really important articles at least - so don't worry, our selection should include plenty of films. I understand your problem with films. Certainly having a list of "top" ranked articles is much better than no importance ranking at all, and it should be possible to be relatively objective to compile such a selection based on "Best 100 films of all time" type lists, as long as national biases can be allowed for. Walkerma (talk) 04:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can speak for several other projects which have difficulties determining the exact importance of all the articles with which they deal. However, I can see at least potentially how it might be useful even for the film project itself to try to go through and rank for at least "Top" or "High" importance. I can easily believe, for instance, that Gone with the Wind (film), Star Wars, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal and other articles about comparatively important films might benefit from having them acknowledged as being more important than, say, Porky's Revenge. John Carter (talk) 14:30, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Expert review proposal

I have been informed of a new proposal to review articles for accuracy, at Wikipedia:Reviews. The idea does not seem to be a bad one, and I wouldn't have any objections to seeing it become successful, but I am not myself necessarily knowledgable about enough subjects to know how necessary it would be in most areas. I do note that it would be potentially extremely useful for religious subject matter. I would welcome any input on the subject at the talk page. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 14:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh dear. This combines a new group of functionaries with poorly-defined powers, a self-perpetuating selection and promotion process, no requirement for actual qualifications, and vague criteria for membership; and a review process that only checks discrete facts, has no academic validation, and litters articles with oversized banners. It's basically taking all the worst aspects of every existing review process we have and lumping them together into a new, bureaucratic whole. Kirill 15:23, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You have several points. As indicated on the talk page, I think this might work best with Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check. But it might not be a bad idea to have some sort of full, formal review of at least some of the more potentially biased articles submitted for the CD before their inclusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by John Carter (talk • contribs) 16:59, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would also highly recommend spending some time perusing the content review workshop discussions currently underway, and interacting closely with those editors, before adding yet another review process to Wikipedia. One of the main goals of the workshop is to make the current gamut of reviews more streamlined, efficient, and integrated - possibly by merging some too. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 21:58, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the aim is good, and we will need a system to check facts. However, I think the system as described is unlikely to work in practice. Most systems with this level of sophistication grow from something simple, by consensus of the community - I've yet to see a one-person initiative like this gain traction. We definitely want to be able to improve the quality of the content of the next release, but I'd prefer to see reform of existing systems rather than a whole new, complicated system. It seems to me that true peer review should be focussing more on the content rather than the technical aspects anyway. But at present the WikiProjects mainly fulfil that role, somewhat informally.

One other grave concern with this idea, is how the process is designed. Kirill rightly points out the shortcomings of the reviewing process, but it is also unclear what will happen to the article after review. If I have invested 20 hours of my time fact-checking a major article thoroughly (I suspect that will be the time needed to do the job properly), the value of my work is largely destroyed after one edit - you can no longer trust the article. Once (if?) we have the flagged revisions option available to us, I think we can set up a system based around that. I still hope to see m:Wikicite available to us as well, which could make the work much more streamlined.

Let's hope this contributor can work with the community, and perhaps contribute his ideas and opinions to the existing fora such as WP:CRW (the ideal place) and here. I think then his ideas can have a much greater impact. Walkerma (talk) 04:02, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I also responded at Wikipedia_talk:Reviewing#Responses, and mentioned this discussion. Walkerma (talk) 04:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my response on Wikipedia talk:Reviewing. Cheers, — Thomas H. Larsen 08:38, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Need assistance

Can someone explain how we can add the multicolored assessment graph (which allows for an overview of all the articles tagged as part of a project, with colors showing how many articles have each rating) to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Contemporary music? Most of the other WikiProjects seem to have this but we don't know how to add this to our new project. Thank you, Badagnani (talk) 02:15, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just add {{Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Contemporary music articles by quality statistics}} wherever you wanna drop it. Good luck! Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 02:30, 31 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment graph

Is there some way to have the list row line up above the assessed row? Because, as it is, there's assessed, list, total. It looks weird. Lara❤Love 04:46, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree with this, as well. Any project which has decided to use the class clearly is going to regard these articles as having already been assessed. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 04:54, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Normally Oleg watches this page and responds, but he seems to have missed it so I reposted it at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. I agree with your point. Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FL

I just thought i'd add a small note in that i noticed an anomaly in that there were capitalised and uncapitalised versions of many of the other classes except this one, so i created a redirect. Now it is possible to do

class=FL

and

class=fl

whch produces the same result. Simply south (talk) 12:54, 12 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Walkerma (talk) 03:48, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log

I ran Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log and the tab froze. I restarted it and it seems that all the listings that were determined in the first partial run were lost. Can these be produced?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 02:29, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm wondering if the problem is with your browser or something - I'm getting a normal-looking log entry for today. Here is the diff, maybe that will show up better for you? If the problem persists, can you give more details? Which "tab" froze? Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 03:52, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There should be many more changes. I know for certain that Michelle Obama was promoted to GA on the 14th and it is not showing up for example.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:11, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently the bot did its job by adding Michelle Obama to Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality/1. Unfortunately, if the log information of a partial run is lost, it can't be recovered. My suggestion would be to not run the bot for very long projects, like Chicago, and rather wait for the scheduled runs. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just ran the page at http://www.math.ucla.edu/~aoleg/wp/wp10/run_wp10.html and it froze again. The following is the last text on the page:

Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F29&action=edit&oldid=&section= Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F30&action=edit&oldid=&section= Submitting Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality/30. Retrieving http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVersion%201.0%20Editorial%20Team%2FChicago%20articles%20by%20quality%2F30&action=edit --TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 06:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that's what I mentioned before, you should not run the script for long projects. The server I am running it on seems to cut off exceedingly long requests. The web-based interface is better for smaller projects. Big and established projects better wait for the standard four-day run. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:49, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In the past scheduled runs occurred either every two or three days. Thus, when it got to the fourth day I assumed something was down.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 16:33, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The KLF

From the FAQ, this was added by Walkerma a long time ago: "There has been much discussion also on smaller, specialised releases, perhaps on Chemistry or The KLF." Really? A 0.7 release covering the band, The KLF? - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:26, 29 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It wouldn't be a V0.7 release, it would be simply a collection of the KLF articles, many of which are quite well developed. If you're interested in helping put together such a release, let us know. Walkerma (talk) 03:32, 29 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Idolatry

Hello,

I've noticed that Idolatry was selected for inclusion into Version 1.0 of wikipedia. To avoid accusations of religious bias, I'd like to request that Iconodule or Hagiography or Icon is also included.

Clinkophonist (talk) 12:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know much about the first two, but icon would be a good choice. Please can you nominate it at WP:V0.7N and I'll review it. Thanks! Walkerma (talk) 18:44, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Article name changes

Could not see any obvious guidence, so I'm posting here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Medicine_articles_by_quality/32 currently has an entry for Wheals which was inferer to the existing referrenced Wheal, also Welt (medicine) is just alternative name for the same thing. I've merged the lot into Wheal, but can't see how to change the redirect issues here in your listings. David Ruben ^Talk 14:49, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. If an article that had previously been assessed separately is now a redirect, though, simply change the assessment of the redirect to "redirect" or "non-article" and the bot will automatically adjust the listings on its next run through. If you're talking about something else, maybe a bit of clarification would help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by John Carter (talk • contribs) 14:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah thanks - that us what I needed to know (that automatically done by a bot) David Ruben ^Talk 22:51, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FL-class article assessment

Hi there. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've been trying to add an FL-class section to the "article scorebox" at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/College football articles by quality statistics Is there a way to properly create this so that the article assessment bot will update the scorebox with any new FL-class articles in the project (based, of course, on the templates from the talk pages)? JKBrooks85 (talk) 22:33, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewed article on set theory

Hi, The page on set theory is marked as both vital and reviewed. I am not sure what the review process involves, but as a mathematician I think that page is low quality. It has more objections than content and does not do the topic justice. I have several simple books on my shelf that have a much better starting intro than the wikipedia page on set theory. I am not sure how to mark these quality issues, and I am not in the math-editing mode these days to spend time to rewrite that page. But I think you guys should know, so maybe it can get improved. Thanks History2007 (talk)

"Vital" means that the article is considered very, very important. "Reviewed" means that the article was, at some point, reviewed by one of our editors, who presumably knew something about mathematics, unlike me, and was found at that time to be free from serious, unverifiable error. That doesn't necessarily mean that the article is "good", though. We have several articles which are about important subjects that, well, need a lot of work. Allah, Dushanbe, and Anatomy are other examples of important articles that aren't very good yet. It is our intention to try to focus attention on these important articles, though. If at some point you could help with this or any article, it would be very much appreciated. John Carter (talk) 00:54, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I will try to do some editing on that page. But if I were to do that on all pages that bother me, I would need 36 hours a day to do it. I think there is a more fundamental issue here:

Wikepedia has clearly demonstrated that the centralization of knowledge by the users for the users can have substantial benefits. Yet, as I look at the more technical pages, I am often alarmed by the glaring errors that exist in plain sight. In many cases, it appears that well meaning students may be contributing text by copying paragraphs from various online sources, but the end result is less than correct. And these are not just obscure pages, but pages that are designated as vital.

Wikepedia pages that deal with city locations and major sights, or with literary figures and their list of books seem to be mostly error free and can be relied upon. But on more complex topics (such as biochemistry) where I am not an expert, I hesitate to rely on Wikepedia. I wonder if expert biologists get as alarmed when they read those pages, as I am when I read an advanced page on mathematics or computer science. The key problem is that the ratio of experts to general users is low, so on scientific topics we do run the risk of having an encyclopedia written by the students for the students. Clearly, one could not run a university that way and an encyclopedia should not either. The eventual solution may be to designate vital scientific pages as semi-protected so they can only be edited by science-administrators. I think that day will eventually arrive.

I may be able to do something about this page, but the general problem needs to be thought about. History2007 (talk) 01:02, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's been more than thought about, believe me. And not just regarding the hard sciences. My field, such as it is, is religion/philosophy, and I've found quite a few "misstatements" in those areas as well. But, as you indicated, there are comparatively few really expert editors in really any field, and the few there are are often overextended. When you find what you consider to be really serious problems, though, it generally would be useful to contact a related WikiProject where the people, with luck, will know something about the subject and be able to correct the problem. You can find a comparatively old one (I'm still working on the revision) at WP:PROJDIR and its various subpages. John Carter (talk) 01:08, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a classic example of the starfish story, cliched as that has become. I started out in 2004 by noticing that WP had abysmal coverage (with "glaring errors"!) of metal chlorides, so I got some good books and references then went ahead and wrote a whole series of articles over the next year. We all try and contribute where we can; the good articles you've seen were once just as bad as the set theory article! But one interesting result of adding solid content is that people of like mind often join you in writing more, the improvements occur more rapidly and a community develops. If you have a good knowledge of set theory, please improve this (very weak) article, then others from WP Mathematics will probably join you. As well, around 25,000 people a month will be grateful for your efforts, and if the article is improved, that number will grow a lot. So please do what you can! Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:01, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well Martin, I was thinking of the best way to do that article but your starfish story started my tears... now putting away my Kleenex, I may be able to start again.... No seriously, please, please, please realize that some of us do not need a "25,000 fans a nanosecond" type of "one for the team" encouragement. I was going to edit that specific page out of respect for the topic and the work of Georg Cantor, not for the 25,000 long distance thank you notes. But I must say that there is an underlying trend among Wiki-people that amazes me: Most of them (yourself included) seem to believe in work, more than they believe in process automation and/or clever computers. So more man-power seems to be the suggested solution to all problems, as you suggested to me. The moto of most Wiki-people seems to be the same: "I will work harder, you do the same". I guess you know whose motto that was: Boxer.

Generally, I prefer processes that accelerate development, and have built in safeguards - not just raw manpower. E.g. a possible solution may be two tier pages, where every student can edit tier 2, but every 6 months an expert will move that content to tier 1. That way, experts do not feel that their effort may be wiped away in a second if they do not watch the page. And it takes major effort to watch pages. If Wikipedia is a "knowledge bank", there needs to be more control on the safety of the deposits.

Yet, amazingly Wikipedia still mostly works! When I Googled Boxer for a link (I read that book too long ago), the Wikipedia link came up and was the best link. So maybe Boxer was 30% right, but probably not 100% right. Yet there was an inconsistency on that page too. The Boxer page interprets his 2nd motto "is always right" differently from the book page. I wonder which one is correct.... History2007 (talk) 08:49, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Aha! If you're interested in processes to make things more efficient, this is definitely the place to come. We're a small group, but a lot goes on behind the scenes. If you doubt my commitment to automation, take a look at this list, where I've been involved in designing a formula for automating the article selection process. I'm also very committed to the idea of flagged revisions and having versions of articles fact-checked and (ideally) reviewed by experts. It's not exactly what you're proposing, but it achieves much of the same aims. In my area, chemistry, I'm pretty sure that all of the content I added in 2004-2005 is basically still there, and it's watched by many people besides myself. If you're interested in these issues, and you are willing to take the initiative, this editorial group is a good place to work. I would still say, however, that the words on the page have to be written, one at a time, and there's no substitute for that! Walkerma (talk) 14:40, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think you will find version management to be more complicated than it appears. Such strategies were attempted for database control back in the early 1980's and there were a couple of PhDs on that topic at Stanford, but got nowhere. What will make a difference in my opinion is a piece of software that detects the degree of change a page has undergone and then notifies a user/expert based on specific conditions. Wikipedia already tries a simple version of this idea via a user initiated "minor change flag". This needs to be automated to take less work since the flag is visible only for the last change. To understand that this is totally possible to implement, take a simple website like Craigslist.org. They can detect if a post for selling an item is the old post that has a few words changed or not. And givn the section tags in Wikipages makes it even easier. That way, only for vital pages an expert gets notified if the page has undergone substantial change. And that does not need to be checked every minute, it can be checked every day/night, at a time when serverload is not too high. This type of clever computing then reduces work for the experts and turns them into less of Expert Boxer types who work too much.

I have enough other things to do that I can not sit down and write code for this right now. But if you know who the "chief algorithm designer" for Wikipedia is, you can suggest this and they may just be able to add it. The "key to success" here will be to anticipate their built in fear of server overload due to these computations and calm their nerves beforehand by pointing out that the computational costs are managable. This type of clever checking will eventually be done on most "community based systems" so Wikipedia may just start now. History2007 (talk) 21:09, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

NEWS: Wikipedia is really surprising. I just started editing the set theory article and suddenly (as one of you pedicted) people came out from the wood work and added a lot. So much so that there is now a question of mathematical gluttony and I think there will be too much on the page. But they seem to know the topic well and the page will probably be a reasonable page after all. This was an interesting e-social phenomenon. History2007 (talk) 21:32, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion regarding 1.0 style matters

Some of you may be interested in the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Throwing several consensus-gathering projects into one basket, which deals with what if any stylistic and other matters regarding the print version should be addressed before that print version is made. John Carter (talk) 18:21, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks John, I wanted to make sure it didn't get trashed in the first few hours with "Noob, begone!" before I brought it up here. But yes, please do see it. I'm enthusiastic about Version 1.0, and I bring it up often. There is a kind of random, indistinct resistance to the idea of thinking about layout and look-and-feel issues when Wikipedia is printed, and I was thinking it would be best just to invite everyone to have their say, find out where there's consensus for layout issues, get approval for bots, and be done with it, so that it doesn't keep coming up in separate contexts on different style guideline pages. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 22:18, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

AAA?

Um, huh? "I notice you list AAA and BBB as interests, and there are plenty of articles in those areas that need reviewing!" - Dan Dank55 (talk) 21:35, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Factual review

Team members might be interested in factual review, a new system that I have proposed (and which I have received very little feedback on). — Thomas H. Larsen 08:23, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I gave you some feedback on this last month, and it looks like you've gotten good feedback from others. If people haven't participated, that may mean they're not going to, probably because there's already a well-attended project that does fact-checking: WP:FACT. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 13:11, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Quality statistics table

Could someone please look into including the following on the quality statistics table? - LA @ 07:49, 30 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Category-Class

Image-Class

Template-Class

NA-Class

Any other classes not currently included

Has there been any movement on this issue? - LA @ 00:36, 4 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I wasn't able to respond when this came in, so I missed it. These have been discussed, but the consensus has always been to try and keep the stats simple and stick only to mainspace pages. This is for two reasons: (a) We don't want the bot's code to get so complicated that it crashes or slows right down - it's kept very busy and a lot of people depend on it. (b) Some projects (including the 1.0 project that coordinates this) just use the basic classes, and they want to have a nice, concise little stats table. We recently added FL-Class and List-Class to help projects, and although these are mainspace there was still some opposition to including them. The code was written so that projects that don't use those classes don't get their stats tables cluttered up with blank rows. We now have some more help with the code writing, and this may help us deal with it. We should probably have an IRC discussion on this; I'll email a couple of people. In the meantime, if you want to pursue this further the best place to discuss this issue is at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index - but read through the recent discussions first. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 17:09, 4 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:ILLINOIS

Does WP:ILLINOIS have a page similar to WP:CHICAGO's Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log? I ask because Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Illinois articles by quality log does not seem to exist.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTD) 18:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 21:13, 3 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Needed-Class article talk pages are being deleted

I tagged a few pages with a WikiProject banner and gave them the Needed-Class quality assessment. They have been deleted. I found them and asked the person who deleted them to restore them, however, there needs to be a way to keep this from happening again. To others who have used Needed-Class, you should check your Needed-Class articles categories, they may be all empty. - LA @ 00:35, 4 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to hear that; I think the WikiProject should make the decisions on how their banners are used (assuming basic protocols of course). Was the template itself deleted, or was the banner removed from the talk pages - can you explain? Walkerma (talk) 17:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Revamp of the assessment descriptions

Please see these proposals and comment there. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 18:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hello from ITN team

Hello. Recently, there was a discussion about including deaths of prominent individuals in the ITN section on the Main page. One of the current proposals is to have a list of top important/prominent/notable people and if anyone from the list dies, he is mentioned in the templaet, otherwise not. In order not to create a list from a scratch, I turn to you, do you have anything appropriate? I have already asked the guys at biography wikiproject, they directed me here. Thanks for feedback, greetings. --Tone 20:36, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm the guy who directed him here. I think it could be a good idea. I'd try to include the Top and High importance blp's. That's about 48,000 articles, admittedly, but figuring at least half of those aren't living biographies, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get together a list of the blp articles and use that as a guide. John Carter (talk) 21:14, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We do have this list which shows the biographical articles we have selected for Version 0.7 from WikiProject assessments, based on both importance and quality. We're still developing the algorithm, but if you like I could see if the bot could give you a list of articles with living=yes and an importance rank above 1000; this would probably give you a working list of perhaps a 1000-2000 important living people. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for? Walkerma (talk) 21:31, 12 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This would be a good beginning. Could you generate it so we can have a look? --Tone 10:33, 13 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I will request this. Assuming it can be done, it will probably take at least a few days, I expect, since it will involve writing some code, testing, etc. How many entries do you want? We can set the cutoff anywhere you like. Walkerma (talk) 01:19, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since the coding is more or less the same in each case, would it be hard to make a list of 500, 1000 and 2000? I suppose this algorithm will be useful for another tasks as well so I hope I am not giving you extra work :-) Thanks. --Tone 21:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to get full recent changes for a project?

I'm wanting recent changes for U.S. road articles. There are 24 pages that list them all, but I tried including them all in one page and that page won't load or update. (Related changes shows only the template that I had to use to even make the page save at all.) If the templates were on the articles, a hidden category could be added, and related changes for the category could be used, but the templates are on the talk pages. Is there an easy way that I haven't thought of? --NE2 17:48, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Are you wanting more than the log? This tracks all assessment changes. If you want more, (in effect) to have something like a watchlist of all US Roads articles, then it may be possible to set up a bot to do that. For that purpose, you could ask User:Beetstra who wrote a similar bot for WP:Chem, which watches likely spam/vandalism articles from WP:Chem and reports any edits to those onto the chemistry IRC channel. Beetstra is very busy in real life right now, but he might share his code with someone who isn't. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 05:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking for something like Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people. --NE2 23:00, 17 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've generated a list of around 9000+ articles from the 24 "by quality" lists, usingWP:AWB (it was very quick to do). I've posted nearly all of them on your list page, and the recent changes works very well. However, the page is well over 200k long now, and it won't let me add any more (even small numbers); the remainder are in my sandbox at User:Walkerma/Sandbox2; I may try transcluding these in using subst. I'm working late, and I'll try again later when Wikipedia speeds up considerably. Tantalisingly close - the list is over 90% complete, but I can't get that last few % to load! One other small problem; a few characters seem to have been corrupted during the list generation, and these appear as squares in the lists and break the links. If this list is useful, you may be able to fix these by hand, but at least most articles are OK. I hope this meets your needs. Walkerma (talk) 02:27, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I tried that, and yeah, it didn't work. (I actually found all pages in the categories and converted from talk, which took a bit longer but is more definitely complete.) Did you open it in Wordpad? In Notepad I didn't get the Asian characters. It seems MediaWiki doesn't want to save a page with more than a certain number of links. I actually think I got it working by splitting it in two and using inclusion, but I don't know for sure that it didn't choke somewhere and it should ideally be simple to update. --NE2 06:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I used Wordpad. I don't think it's just Asian characters, though, it loses some of the square brackets too. As for getting a page short enough to load properly, I'm wondering if it can be done by having two or three sub-pages linked to from the /all articles page, and then you check that little box that says "Show changes to pages linked to the given page instead." I'm very busy with "real life" work right now, or I'd try it myself - do you think that could work? Walkerma (talk) 15:25, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That show changes for everything that links to a page: [1] --NE2 23:43, 19 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Needed class

There is a deletion discussion at CfD Category:Needed-Class articles which asserts that "needed-class articles" is supported by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team as one of the Category:Articles by quality. Please comment at that deletion discussion. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 20:52, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Space

Space is listed as a vital article by this project, so members might be interested in commenting at Talk:Space, where a suggestion has been made to split the article and turn it into a disambiguation page. Hiding T 22:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Chicago stats

The Chicago project stats were only produced five times in April and have not been produced since the 23rd. Can we get it to run every two or three days.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 07:28, 1 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey i concur with Tony, Wikiproject Lebanon's stats haven't been updated since the date he mentioned. Is there a bot glitch? Eli + 22:09, 3 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll ask CBM. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:36, 4 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Naming

I don't think the project should be called Wikipedia 1.0 since later versions would have to be 2.0 3.0 so on, and that seems to imply major changes to the software/medium of presentation. Instead it should be called Wikipedia 2008 or whatever year for which it will be released. 24.5.246.233 (talk) 16:28, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New version of Igor

Igor 0.2.0 is available, and it includes a number of features that may be useful to the members of the team, including a Wikiproject Browser and some task-force support. If you have the time, please download it and take it for a little test drive. I'm always open to suggestions, so by all means let me have it! The next release (0.3.0) will be a quick one, so if they're fairly simple ones, they may make it into that version. Many thanks! – Clockwork Soul 04:24, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Votes on changing the assessment scale

We're considering putting A below GA, and adding a C-Class between Start and B. Please choose your favourite option here. Walkerma (talk) 05:35, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Assessments table

If a project is not in 1.0, can an assessments table still be generated? --Una Smith (talk) 15:45, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The way it works is that when you tag the article talk pages with the project template, then they automatically become part of the 1.0 system (assuming that the template and categories have been set up). However, that doesn't need to affect anything you do at the project. There is no way to generate a table unless the articles are tagged and the categories made. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 15:57, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Request for assessment table

Please help I have spent a couple of hours setting up Wikipedia:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith and I'm still a little new at assessment and banners and what-have-you. If anyone has some spare time, could you take a look at {{WikiProject Bahá'í Faith}} and Wikipedia:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith/Assessment to see if I can get one of these assessment tables generated? Please respond on my talk or the talk for the WikiProject. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:42, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, after checking Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot, I added Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments to the "...articles by quality" page. Now you just need to wait 2-3 days and the bot should generate tables and a log for you. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 03:27, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much This is very helpful. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:38, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Still waiting? It's still not working; is there anything I can do to help generate it? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

date autoformatting is optional

I'd like to remind members of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team that for some time now, the autoformatting of dates has not been required.

There are four advantages in not linking dates:

Inconsistent raw formatting within an article is obvious to editors and thus less likely to escape our attention. (The autoformatting mechanism conceals the inconsistencies from us, the very people who are most likely to enforce consistency, but the raw formats are displayed in bright blue to almost all readers, who are not registered and logged in. The rules for the choice of format in an article are in MOSNUM, here); they are easily summarised as (a) be consistent within an article; (b) take account of national ties to a topic; and (c) retain the existing format unless there's a good reason not to.
There are fewer bright-blue splotches in the text, which makes it slightly easier to read and improves its appearance.
The following issues concerning the dysfunctional aspects of the autoformatting mechanism do not arise:
- piped links to date elements ([[20 June|20]], [[20 June]] [[1997 in South African sport|1997]]) (several forms of piped links break the date formatting function);
- links to date ranges in the same calendar month e.g. December 13–17 or the night of 30/31 May – the autoformatting mechanism will damage such dates (30/May 31);
- links to date elements on disambiguation pages;
- links to date elements in article and section headings; and
- links to date elements in quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
As a minor advantage, edit windows are slightly easier to read and edit.

It may be that WikiMedia can be persuaded to invest resources in revamping the mechanism to avoid or mitigate these problems, but this is unlikely to occur in the short to medium terms. TONY (talk) 14:06, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

C-Class assessments not working with the MathBot?

Hi, I was setting up the assessment mechanisms this morning for the Catullus WikiProject, and I noticed that the new C-Class assessments are not being counted by the MathBot. They turn up as "Unassessed" instead. It's possible that I made a mistake in setting up the template, but if not, could this be fixed, please? Thanks, all! :) Willow (talk) 19:05, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The bot is picking up C-Class articles now, so I'm betting it is something having to do with the template. I'll look at it. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:27, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it works as already coded. I'm not sure what happened to cause it to recognize articles as unassessed. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:40, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since Category:C-Class Catullus articles is empty, the bot does not add its row in the stats table. This kind of behavior was agreed on a while ago. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:35, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Replied at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index. Thanks, all! :) Willow (talk) 11:26, 25 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Any suggestions on how to get these assessments into the table of Oregon-related articles?? I added a blank row to the table, not sure if this is necessary or if it's enough to get the bot's attention. (I made the project's first couple of C assessments yesterday.) Thanks for any help! - Pete (talk) 17:35, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the bot hasn't passed through the Oregon project since July 2, but the assessments were done on July 5 & 6. I keep the log pages of my WikiProjects on my watchlist so I can see when the updates happen - check back after the next bot update. If there's still a problem, let us know, but I've been told that C-Class is generally working fine now. Walkerma (talk) 03:47, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Missing articles and WikiProjects?

I was delighted with the coverage you all got in the Signpost this week! :) I noticed, though, in your trial index, that some articles and even whole WikiProjects seemed to be missing, e.g., Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics. Is there perhaps a glitch in the assessments? Willow (talk) 20:22, 24 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(I thought I'd already posted my reply to this - sorry about that!) The trial index was based on lists compiled in February, and so if the WP:Electronics list wasn't part of the system at that time it would have been missed. We will be doing a lot of work on the Selection Bot starting in a week or so, and I'll be sure to check that WP:Electronics shows up! Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 06:58, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia and School CD-Roms

Last night I was talking to User:Vassyana on Skype and he supports an idea I have that would benefit schools around the United States and a later time, international schools. What I want to do is spearhead a project that would benefit schools by giving them CD-ROMs about the area they live in. If you're confused, lemme show you an example:

- Syracuse, New York:

A Syracuse topic would include some to all of the towns around it, with a detailed history about the towns and give them a better idea where they live. The twelve Finger Lakes would also be a good addition.

This idea is basically a proposal to help rural schools (who don't have the best of updated books and such) and some suburban schools that fall under the same policy. If Wikipedia is able to do this, it would be a big benefit to schools in the U.S. Please reply, as this is a great proposal IMO.Mitch32 09:53, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Addendum: If people agree with this, I will look into the ideas and a drive in what to put together and gas up the production.Mitch32^(UP) 14:11, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a great idea. I think we're reaching the point where we can do this sort of thing quite easily. You should collaborate with this group, as well as Wikipedia:WikiProject New York, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikislice. You may also want to talk to User:BozMo, who has done two offline releases for schools (see the 2007 release. You could perhaps include all of BozMo's articles (for some kid-friendly general knowledge), and then get Syracuse/geographical related articles from the following lists (which will be expanded and updated next month):

If you have enough interest in a specific city (e.g., Syracuse), can I suggest that you start a page to coordinate things? You could do that as a page off the New York WikiProject if they support it, or do it off the 1.0 site if necessary. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 16:21, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is not just for NY. This would be, at first, for the whole country. If it is possible, I would like to spearhead a committee &/or campaign to work on articles and have them produced on CD-ROMs and then shipped to correct schools.Mitch32^(UP) 17:22, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I understand - I simply gave these as an example. Also, you'd probably want a pilot city to try out first. I think you'll find that pretty much all of the US states have WikiProjects, and many of the larger cities have their own too. I'd recommend involving them if you can. Linterweb would be happy to produce the CDs with an offline reader, if there is someone to pay for them. And you'd need to have contacts in the educational system who would coordinate things with the schools - it would probably be BOCES in New York State (FYI, I live only about 120 miles from Syracuse!), but I'm sure there are similar organizations elsewhere. Walkerma (talk) 06:09, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This project has been started at Wikipedia:Wikimedia School Team Geoff Plourde (talk) 22:11, 29 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As Mitch mentions above, I talked with him about the idea and I think it's a very solid proposal. There are plenty of rural and urban school districts that have limited and/or out-of-date classroom materials that could benefit from such a project. It would also be a real-world education application of Wikipedia, which would be of benefit to the project, particularly with feedback from educators about the materials provided. Vassyana (talk) 23:16, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Arkanasas template

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arkansas articles by quality statistics is not showing the importance of the articles, could someone fix this? --Chetblong^Talk/_ARK 03:52, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hopefully this change should fix it. Check after the bot makes its next update (see the log and let us know if the importance still fails to appear. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Help please.

Can someone take a look at this and fix it? I can't figure out the problem. It here:Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arena Football League articles by quality statistics. Thanks, Cra sh U nderride 15:57, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can you explain what the problem is? Everything looks fine to me! Walkerma (talk) 14:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality log has not run since June 2nd and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log has not run since June 3rd. Both are too large for me to run them by hand.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 11:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was alarmed at first, but I see from the logs you meant July 2nd and 3rd, not June! I suspect this delay is probably a result of the new C-Class, and the resultant flurry of assessment activity. Since the speed of the bot depends a lot on the change in the listings, it's probably a case of a lot of changes => a long time between bot runs. The bot does seem to be running normally, and it looks like others have the same problem (last run July 2nd as I look at it now), so I suspect that we may just have to be patient during this transition. I'll update you here if it looks like it will be a serious problem. Walkerma (talk) 14:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, a closer look at the log, at the last 500, does show the bot stopping and starting. I'll try and find what's up. Walkerma (talk) 14:33, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Any word?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:11, 13 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Maintainence issue: Redirects

So the new C-class inspired me to go through the lists looking for candidates, and I found a significant problem: Redirects, still with assessment templates on their talk pages. So I went through the WP:VG list and found well over a thousand redirects marked as stubs. While I'd like to take a moment to encourage editors to remove assessment templates when merging and/or redirecting, I'd also like to suggest that it could also be relegated to bot work. It doesn't need to be frequent, but a spring-cleaning of our lists every so often would keep our article counts from inflating too much. Nifboy (talk) 19:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean exactly? Like replacing class=Ga, and class=ga by class=GA across all templates? Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 21:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, I mean pages like these, where the article has been redirected but the talk page and assessments have been left intact, so the redirect still shows up as an article in the 1.0 lists. I've been going through and removing the project templates by hand, something a bot can do. Nifboy (talk) 22:49, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have been doing these also, by hand, for the last week. Seems like good work for a bot. --Paleorthid (talk) 06:05, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The main WP 1.0 bot can't do such work, it would require downloading one-by-one and searching through more than a million assessed articles and figuring out which are redirects. I think CBM has some scripts for querying directly the replicated database on the toolserver to find out the redirects. Try asking him on his talk page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I introduced a redirect class for this reason at the comics project.It allows tracking and better visibility. I don;t think it interferes with what you do here, either. Hiding T 09:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A-Class review

What are the steps involved in setting up an A-class review for a project like WP:CHICAGO. We have a ton of Category:GA-Class Chicago articles that need help getting to Category:FA-Class Chicago articles.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

B-class colour not changed on articles by quality

See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Devon articles by quality/1, where the the B-class appears yellow. It should be green. bsrboy (talk) 20:44, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was away when your earlier post came in. I think the bot writers may need to fix this, so I replied here. Walkerma (talk) 21:13, 19 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:CITIES

The WP 1.0 Bot needs to be fixed. It is not putting WP:CITIES C-class articles in new categories, doesn't list C-class in the table, and puts all C-class articles in the unassessed class for the wikiproject. If someone could fix that, it would be great! Thanks! Dr. Cash (talk) 15:41, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There doesn't appear to be any articles in Category:C-Class WikiProject Cities articles. If you can find a C-class WPCITIES article, I'll try and fix the problem. There may be a problem wih the talk page banner. bsrboy (talk) 15:49, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I think the problem is that the Template:WPCities template is putting the C-class articles into the unassessed category, instead of the C-class category. I can't edit the page since a sysop just protected it on july 10, so someone else is going to have to fix it. Dr. Cash (talk) 18:45, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I had a look at the template. The C-class isn't included in it, so I made another version of the temlate in Template:WPCities/Sandbox, which should work. Ask a sysop to copy and paste what's in the sandbox onto the template. Hope it works! bsrboy (talk) 18:50, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed it for you. Should work. -Djsasso (talk) 19:28, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, thanks! bsrboy (talk) 19:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Will take a few minutes for all the previously classed articles to shift over though. -Djsasso (talk) 19:32, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Dr. Cash (talk) 21:13, 22 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, why always assume it's bot's fault? :) Unless more than one project reports the same problem, the problem is usually with the project in question. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:30, 23 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

DWIM. Nifboy (talk) 05:43, 23 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment Chart

How do i get this chart to include the classes: list, features list, category, and template. They have all been added to the project, and have articles classified as such, but don't appear on the chart. Also, when does it update? Grk1011 (talk) 20:13, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

C-Class problem

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/WikiProject Illinois articles by quality log is not handling C-class. It is counting them as no class even though Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality statistics is counting them correctly, I believe.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:31, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is odd. I went to check the WikiProject Chicago banner to find that it uses Template:WPBannerMeta, so maybe it's an error in there or the bot. 86.29.138.203 (talk) 00:57, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is actually that {{WikiProject Illinois}} doesn't use WPBannerMeta, and it had not been converted to recognise C-Class categories. I've converted the banner to WPBannerMeta, which should fix the problem. Happy‑melon 13:36, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks it is working fine.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 05:21, 5 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IRC discussion on Version 0.7

We are hoping to get Version 0.7 together in the next month or so, with a plan to publish this fall, so we need to hold an IRC meeting with the French publisher (Linterweb). I expect we will have more IRC discussions in the coming months. Please sign up if you plan to attend, and add any agenda items you think need covering.

Channel: #wikipedia-1.0
Time: Monday, August 11th at 1900h UTC (3pm EDT, 2100h CET)
Duration: Maximum of two hours; any business remaining after two hours will be held over till the next meeting.

Agenda

We will try to get through as much of the following as possible; please stay on-topic!

Scope of the release.
Status of SelectionBot, which is picking articles for Version 0.7.
Writing an index of articles, based on a WikiProject "tree".
Choosing a vandalism-free version of each article, and use of cleanup scripts.
Status of Kiwix as an offline search engine.
Copyright issues
Cover art
Pressing the DVDs
Distribution (website, Amazon etc, Wal-Mart etc.)

Attendees

Walkerma (talk) 16:51, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Rgaudin (talk) 17:17, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
User:Dank55 17:23, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Kelson (talk) 17:32, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 21:11, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Tntnet (talk) 21:22, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Nominaladversary (talk) 19:27, 6 September 2008 (UTC) (Perhaps, I have school.)[reply]

Comments

Improvements to the WP 1.0 bot under discussion

Hi, all. As we know, the Version 1.0 Index stores assessments for over 1.7 million articles. Originally, the bot was designed to process about 10,000 articles; we never actually thought that 70% of Wikipedia was going to be covered under some sort of assessment. That has slowly caused the bot to take longer to run, as bot runs that used to last about four hours now take about four days. To make the bot more efficient, changes to the way the bot framework operates are being discussed, and simultaneously, we are discussing which features it might be worthwhile to add as we are recoding everything. We really would like to have your participation at User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation and its talk page as we do this. Thanks, Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 17:13, 7 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log not running again

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality log has not run since the 13th.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 16:23, 19 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It has not run since the 24th.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:53, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think CBM is away for the holiday weekend, but I notice that the bot is still working hard; if it's still not reached Chicago by Tuesday, we'll see if there is something wrong. Walkerma (talk) 01:23, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Good - looks like it ran later on the 31st. Walkerma (talk) 20:41, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FAR listing

Law has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. -- Vision Thing -- 18:42, 26 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is not a good place to post listings like this: you'd be much better off going to involved wikiprojects or active editors. The editorial team tend to work on much more abstract levels than individual articles. Happy‑melon 18:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Version 0.7 and One Laptop Per Child: IRC discussion

The folks over at One Laptop Per Child are interested in using Version 0.7 as the starting point for a collection used in Anglophone countries for the One Laptop Per Child project. We want to make sure that they have access to our work, and also that we might benefit from tools and experience they have.

Channel: #kiwix
Time: Friday, August 29, 2008 at 1900h UTC (3pm EDT, 2100h CET).

Please join us! Walkerma (talk) 22:21, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Fictional series clean up

The following three pages can be deleted, since WikiProject Fictional series no longer exists, or should I just list these at MfD? LA (T) @ 22:13, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality log

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Fictional series articles by quality statistics

Style questions

I have a lot of questions about how we're going to proceed with style guidelines and copyediting between now and WP 1.0. Opinions welcome at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Groan. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:51, 7 September 2008 (UTC) [reply]

Here's the gist of it. As I've said, 30000 articles on an official Wikipedia DVD is going to cause problems. Our competitors are going to pick out the worst bits and represent that as being "typical" of Wikipedia, and we're not going to have our usual defense available of saying that it was "work in progress" or "vandalized"; no one's going to believe that we didn't put our best work on our DVD. I don't think we're going to be happy with the news stories in the days after the DVD comes out. I'm really hoping that we have a chance to copyedit all 30000 articles at least once before WP 1.0. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:47, 9 September 2008 (UTC) Strikeout of objections that have been addressed. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:01, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been pondering your comments since last night. I do think that the Version 0.7 selection, for which we have a provisional list here, will in fact show mainly our best work. Most in the selection are B-Class or better, and the Start-Class entries are on "must-have" topics (where it would be embarrassing to omit the topic!). There are three things involved that relate to your comments:

The articles we pick. The above link shows something close to our final selection. Personally, I think it would be hard to get a better selection of that size. And we need that size - last time the only criticism was for the small size, not over quality, and our publisher really wants the larger size (since it's what everyone wants).
The versions OF those articles. That is much harder to handle. We can aim to pick versions from non-anon editors, and other basic precautions, but a certain amount of vandalism will creep in. We have scripts that look for "bad words", they will help. We have BozMo's latest selection of around 6000, these are recent and they have been hand-curated, so they should be excellent. We can ask WikiProjects to give us good versions (flagged revisions?!) of the selected articles within their particular areas - that will help a lot, if they participate (I expect we can give them a month or so).
The cleanup of those articles. That is a process that will only begin in a focused way this week - once the proposed final selection has been listed for everyone. That will shine a light on specific articles, and in some cases I can see a project scrambling to improve a key article that has slipped under their radar previously. But that process can only happen slowly - hence your concern.

I think we have to declare that this is only Version 0.7, not Version 1.0, and as such we don't have a 100% foolproof system. There will be errors. But hopefully, there will be only a handful of problem articles, and no real "bloopers". In Version 0.5, we only had scripts, but amazingly I heard no reports of serious errors in the 2000 articles. This time we have a better, though imperfect, system. Regarding quality, I think most of the media are familiar with Wikipedia article quality, and if we produce a selection that is pretty much free from "Bush is gay LOL" then we will have something to be proud of. In the meantime, any ideas for scripts, methods, tricks etc that can reduce the problems will be very welcome here! (And BTW, I really appreciate you taking on this aspect of the release.) Walkerma (talk) 04:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm happy to help. If I go on too much about this, and then it turns out there's no reaction from the media or our competitors, it will sound like I was "crying wolf", so let's wait and see what the reaction is. I would be in favor of giving the wikiprojects more time to review their work, and letting them know that copyeditors are available if they want them. This is, of course, no criticism of your work, Martin. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 11:14, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a list of articles that need copyediting? Hiding T 12:15, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We would really like to get a release done this fall; if we don't, we will be criticised for having lost our way. It doesn't matter too much if it comes out in November or even December, but next year would be too late. However, we will certainly give the projects as long as possible to work on cleanup. Hiding, for now there is no list, but there we could probably generate one. I will ask CBM if it's possible for us to get a specific list of selected articles with cleanup tags, so we can focus our efforts on those. In the meantime, if you want to work on copyedits, you could take a look at the main list - selected articles are in bold. Find a subject area where you feel comfortable, and look through the Start and C-Class articles. Thanks for offering to help! Walkerma (talk) 15:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. Who is a good person to coach me? By which I mean a go to guy/gal for questions. I promise I am a fast learner. ;) Hiding T 10:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Many FAC and GAN reviewers have good copyediting skills, but in general, they want to keep doing what they're doing. I'm going to ask some to share copyediting tips that would be relevant to B-class articles and see what we can get. Hiding, I'll be happy to help you; pick an article, make some changes, ask me some questions, and I'll look at it when you're finished to see if I can add anything. For the purposes of 0.7, don't worry about punctuation (unless it's something that bothers you), but fixing even simple things like misspellings would help a lot. Concentrate on the articles or wikiprojects you care about from the article selection Martin mentioned just above. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:33, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. I have some template work to finish up, so I'll try and make a start next week if that's okay? Hiding T 13:15, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Replied at your talk page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:24, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Copyediting minifesto

All professional publishing uses copyeditors. Publishers and writers are less than honest about this.
Copyediting adapts writing to look right to as wide an audience as possible, and it's also about a lot of stupid little things (like punctuation) that trick the reader into thinking that what's being written is good stuff by giving it the same look-and-feel as other good stuff.
You're not a good copyeditor until at least 100 people have told you that you're a crappy copyeditor.
Copyediting is not optional when you have competitors who are looking for ways to tear you down. Good writers stay positive; good copyeditors think defensively. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:21, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

0.7 Sweeps

[inserted] On the other hand, we don't have time to copyedit 28000 articles before 0.7 goes out the door in (I'm guessing) December, we only have time to look at the articles that haven't gotten enough attention and flag them for minor changes if they need it. I'll have more details later today. One conclusion I hope everyone comes to during the sweeps is that it would be great to get some level of copyediting applied to all the articles before Version 0.8 (maybe?) goes out next December (maybe?). - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:31, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I wholeheartedly agree with this - I'm a great fan of the copyeditor, and we have too few good copyeditors on WP. If the copyeditors we have are willing to get involved, then I would be delighted, though I know they in great demand at GAN and FAC. Would you be willing to set up a sub-project of the WP:1.0 team to coordinate this? We need someone who is committed to the 1.0 project AND to copyediting, and who can persuade others to join him/her. We have a review team that people sign up for, so I think we could have a similar copyediting team. I don't want to delay the release of 0.7 over this, because we can't realistically get 30,000 articles copyedited to perfection in that timeline, but I think we can try to identify the articles that need the most help and focus on those. I'll ask about a bot to write such a list. And if we have a coordinated campaign, we CAN get the full set of 30,000 articles up to a good standard for the next release (probably fall 2009). And not have too many sentences beginning with And. Many thanks, Walkerma (talk) 21:40, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Let me see if I understand the position correctly, per our conversation today. Long hours? No pay? Lots of pressure? Perfect, I accept. People have already started asking me questions ... Sept wanted to know what to do about a couple of articles ... and I've been asking around, and I haven't gotten any answers yet. But I do have more questions: how do we deal with maintenance tags? How do we then deal with the fact that some people may slap maintenance tags on an article to try to keep it out of the DVD? Can we ask the wikiprojects to pick their own copyeditors? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:08, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(Updated) Malleus, Tony, Sept and others (see WT:MOS) are pessimistic about our chances of success with 0.7. (Now that I have a job, I don't have an opinion on this; it might compromise my ability to support whatever we wind up doing.) It would be very helpful if we could attract the attention of 10 or 15 copyeditors experienced at GAN and/or FAC for a couple of months, but if they believe the project is going to be embarrassing, they're not going to help us out. I will keep asking around, and I will report the results. I'm not clear what you're saying about not holding up 0.7, Martin, you were talking about November or December above; is there any update on what kind of drop-dead date we're looking at? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:04, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My qualms, for what it is worth, are about Names of the Greeks and Alexander Hamilton, both of which have moderate to severe content problems (the first also shows all too clearly that it was not written by native speakers). Those are the two articles I have seen in the 0.7 list that I have much personal knowledge of, which does not encourage me about the others. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:55, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Although I've been spending most of my time on style guidelines and at WP:FAC, for the purposes of 1.0, I'd rather not focus on FAs like Names of the Greeks, although I'm perfectly happy for other people to point out problems. I'm more concerned with the articles that no one who calls themselves a copyeditor has ever seen. Alexander Hamilton is way over the WP:SIZE limit, so I don't want to read the whole thing, but coincidentally, someone just told me today that it has problems; thanks for bringing it up. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:43, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Try and read Names before you dismiss it; it has seriously decayed since it passed, and 2005 had looser standards anyway. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mean it's not bad, I mean that there are already review processes in place for FAs and GAs. Until we put 0.7 to bed, I'm concerned about the other 20000 articles. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:37, 11 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Will FARC get it out of 0.7? If so, what will get Alexander Hamilton out of it? - it isn't a FA or GA or likely to be. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:01, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this characteristic of the copyediting we are going to get? If so, I doubt you need worry so much about getting it done; this sample left the article no better than it found it. Some flaws have been fixed; some indifferent matters have complied with the sillier sections of MOS; other and more serious flaws, especially the emdashes which convert qualifying phrases into parentheticals - thus affecting content - have been introduced to balance them. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:11, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I replied privately to Sept. Maralia's edits improved the article, but while I was reading, I had a question. When we're doing article sweeps for 0.7, is it helpful to make a lot of changes that might move the article in the direction of GAN, on the theory that that's a win for everyone? (A win for the article, and a win for the GAN process, and especially, a win for us when it becomes someone else's problem!) Or should we leave what people might regard as "MOS fixes" alone and just fix the missing words and spelling? (Of course, we can't and shouldn't stop people from caring about an article, and fixing anything they want to fix. I'm asking about the goals of the 0.7 sweeps.) - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:30, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another question: Martin has proposed that, for each page that's associated with at least one relevant wikiproject, we let the wikiproject make the decision whether they like our "swept" (i.e. quickly reviewed) version or a later version better. Is this acceptable to everyone?

Martin says his preferred last possible deadline is mid(ish) December. I propose that, whatever it is we're doing during our sweeps, we come up with a guess of how many articles "we" want to sweep. (I don't know who "we" is, and I don't think we need a sign-up sheet, but I'm not talking about the folks who review for GAs, FAs, and specific wikiproject review processes. They're all busy and productive and what they're doing helps 0.7 a lot, although I have started asking them to make themselves available for copyediting and other questions.) If the number of articles we have to cover is 9000, then that's around 3000 a month. I propose that we come up with a guess for what we can expect to do with 3000 articles in a month, then try to do it, and one month later, roughly October 15, we stop, and see how far we got. If we only covered 1500 articles, then we need to put the deadline off to March or later ... I believe consensus is that it's not acceptable to have articles discussing donkey dongs, so each article has to be read quickly once by somebody. When we've got the first third covered, I propose we hand the list (and a list of the specific versions we looked at) to the Communications Committee (ComCom). If they think the quality of the results is bad enough that it would embarrass editors and/or hurt Wikipedia, I think we should listen and go back and do a better job; it's their job to make judgment calls concerning the public perception of Wikipedia. If they're happy, we're good. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:06, 12 September 2008 (UTC) Strikeout of concerns that have been addressed. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:09, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Another proposal is that we give sweepers discretion to do what seems right to them. Yes, we're mainly concerned with donkey dongs, and with meeting deadlines, and if there's time, with spelling errors and bad grammar, but if a sweeper thinks an article should be downgraded and/or removed from the selection and wants to talk about that, I'd be happy to look at the article and talk about that. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:18, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update

I understand that we're now looking at a shorter deadline, sometime in October. We can't possibly get everything done that we might want to do, but that's what makes it fun. I propose that we concentrate on identifying the pages among the 28000 that have gotten the least attention so far, and if there are problems on those pages, marking the last version that didn't have the problems. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 15:36, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we need this work to be completed by October, in order to get the DVDs produced and distributed by December. Sorry if I caused any misunderstanding. Walkerma (talk) 17:53, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake ... when you mentioned December, I thought that was a deadline for us, but you were talking about the guys putting together the DVD. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:32, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

October the 1st or the 31st? I'll try and make a start tomorrow. My expertise, such as it is, is in comics articles, so I'll probably look over those. Hiding T 13:57, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We're aiming for October 20th. The list of Comics articles needing most help is now available [[5]] (updated every hour). Thanks! Walkerma (talk)

Version numbering scheme

I see the first version was 0.5, the next will be 0.7, and the "official" one will be 1.0, but I wonder why you chose not to follow a more reasonable version numbering scheme, ie name the first test release 0.1, then 0.2, 0.3, ... until 1.0. This way, with 0.5 and 0.7, people may assume that there was a 0.1 or a 0.6 release. NerdyNSK (talk) 20:54, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd support calling the next release 0.8. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:33, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, it was because we were going to have a test release (v0.5) before the "real" release (v1.0), but then we pretty much saw that the processes we were using to select articles were not going to scale, so we decided to have another test release (v0.7) using the newer processes. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 21:36, 14 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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