User talk:DeirdreAnne/Archives/2007/09

This page is an archive of past discussions for the period September 2007. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

To answer your questions as best I can:

1. yes, you can (even should) tag the article with {{law-stub}} and also tag the talk page with the law project template, assessing it as a stub. The two tags put the articles into two separate categories, rather than the same category twice (one for the project, one for the stub) so that's not a problem.
2. I don't think there's any rule that you can't assess an article you have created or helped with as stub/start/B-class. In fact, I've been merrily assessing biography articles I've written as stub or start. The article grades beyond that (GA/A/FA) are only handed out after more careful consideration, and can't be self-awarded. But no-one's going to mind if you write a stub and call it a stub: what else would it be? If anyone is really bothered that you've assessed an article as a start instead of a stub, or vice versa, they can change it!
3. I've not seen tags being signed anywhere. I suspect it's best not to, as it will look slightly odd. If someone really wants to know who tagged and assessed an article, it'll be in the talk page history. If you think that someone might contest the inclusion of the tag or the rating, you could leave a quick note of explanation on the talk-page, but most of the time it will be obvious. If it's not, other editors can either reassess the article or discuss with you / the project whether the tag is required.

Hope all this helps. I've haven't been involved with tagging / assessing of law-related articles, but I can't see why they'd have different standards. Regards, Bencherlite^Talk 21:11, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hi, and welcome to the Biography WikiProject! We're a group of editors working to improve Wikipedia's coverage of biographies.

A few features that you might find helpful:

• The project has a monthly newsletter; it will normally be delivered as a link, but several other formats are available.

There are a variety of interesting things to do within the project; you're free to participate however much—or little—you like:

• Starting some new articles? Our article structure tips outlines some things to include.
• Want to know how good our articles are? The assessment department is working on rating the quality of every biography article in Wikipedia.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask another fellow member, and we'll be happy to help you. Again, welcome! We look forward to seeing you around! -Duribald 06:08, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, and welcome to the Military history WikiProject! As you may have guessed, we're a group of editors working to improve Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to military history.

A few features that you might find helpful:

• Our navigation box points to most of the useful pages within the project.
• The announcement and open task box is updated very frequently. You can watchlist it if you're interested; or, you can add it directly to your user page by including {{WPMILHIST Announcements}} there.
• Most important discussions take place on the project's main discussion page; it is highly recommended that you watchlist it.
• The project has several departments, which handle article quality assessment, detailed article and content review, offline publication, article improvement contests, and other tasks.
• We have a number of task forces that focus on specific topics, nations, periods, and conflicts.
• We've developed a variety of guidelines for article structure and content, template use, categorization, and other issues that you may find useful.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask one of the project coordinators, or any experienced member of the project, and we'll be happy to help you. Again, welcome! We look forward to seeing you around! Kirill 08:42, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

I saw your amendment. In Latin, fora would be correct, but forum, I would think, is now part of the English language to the extent that forums is an acceptable plural. "Quorum" is close to this status, but not quite there because it doesn't have the widespread currency of forum. Regards --Rodhullandemu 21:48, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

No problem there but I know how pernickerty lawyers can get (I once acted in a case which revolved round the placing of a comma). I doubt if anyone will pull you up over it. WP:Law seems a little out of date and loosely worded in some areas so there's plenty of scope for improvement. Welcome on board!--Rodhullandemu 22:27, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Doug! Thanks for the message!

I'm not sure how the historical tag got onto WP:Reform. I didn't put it there, and I didn't notice it happen. However, as I recall, the discussion did sorta die. As I recall, User:TimNelson and I were discussing things, and we sorta hit a break-through at about the same time we both seem to have taken breaks.

What I meant by "take a swipe at" is to look over the reform proposal there and see if/how it needs to be cleaned up - and what it would take to make it work. My guess (and I'm no expert at guidelines, process, etc) is that once it looks good, a notice should be placed at WP:VPR and/or WP:RFC. And maybe two weeks later, another set of comments should be placed at those places.

My sense is that it looks good, but needs some cleanup and/or clarification. Honestly, though, I haven't read it in three months. Maybe your comments/questions will kick me into helping out with it some more and getting it running :) I firmly believe there are many dead WikiProjects that need to be merged into active ones or removed.

A thought that just occurred to me is that admins are part of the AfD process, and may or may not need to be part of the WPfD process. Is there a place for asking admins what they think and/or how they might be needed? Just a thought.

Anyway, thanks again for the comment. And let me know what you think and how I can help. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 00:37, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Hm. You've just made me rethink this issue.

I was about to write to you that there isn't a mixed message, mostly because it isn't spelled out anywhere how to remove WikiProjects. And (I believed) there really hadn't been any WikiProjects removed. But I just did a quick search in the logs of MfD and found out that I was wrong.

About 280 WikiProjects have been brought up for deletion. I haven't gone through all of them, so I don't know how many have actually been deleted or merged into others, but that's a much larger number than I thought.

So I was questioning whether Wikipedia:WikiProject reform was even necessary, but I think I've decided that it is. MfD just isn't suited for the kind of discussion that's been suggested at Reform - it isn't specific to WikiProjects, after all.

I guess I agree that there are mixed messages, but I disagree that WPfD should be done within WP:Council. My main reason is that WP:Council is a tiny place - there are very few people involved, and (as you can see from the discussion page) not many of them are very active in it. By following up on WPfD and making it an active and useful process, we'll be opening up WP discussions to a much wider audience and getting true consensus. It may not result in as many projects being deleted as we would like, but it may get people involved from related projects and make more wikiprojects active again.

So what's next? Centralize discussion? That seems appropriate. My suggestion is we do that at the Reform page - or perhaps start a discussion at WP:CENT and see if we can get input from others that aren't involved in (or may not know about) WP:Council. Thoughts? -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 20:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Doug! Please take a look at User:SatyrTN/mfd when you get a chance. There are a couple things that need to be addressed before releasing that to a wider audience (like the centralized discussion). First among those is there needs to be a guideline page (or just a section of that page) that outlines the options Keep, Merge, Userfy, and Delete. The templates also need to be created, but I suspect that should wait until there's been wider discussion. -- SatyrTN (talk | contribs) 15:51, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

As I envisioned Wikipedia practice at the time of that content, a deprecated policy or project is one that is no longer active, in use, or in force. Such content has historically been maintained (and marked "historical"). Especially as regards policy, deprecation further indicates the policy that supersedes the historical content, when such a target is available.

Of course, not everything winds up working that way, and I'm neutral as to whether or not this is a good system ... only that it is my observations on how things have been done. Serpent's Choice 19:28, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

This is the process that is generally followed whenever anyone wants to recover an article or WikiProject which has previously been deleted, and at least one Project, Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Virginia was returned after having been deleted. Just thought you might like to know. John Carter 01:21, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

I think to some extent that's a "cover all bases" approach - occasionally some disaster happens (one big one happened some years ago) and they lose all deleted contributions. However, with the number of people and institutions who have downloaded database dumps this is far less of a problem than it once was. I don't believe in deletion as archiving, though - however I do use some deleted pages as a guide to following chains of events which would otherwise be rendered incomprehensible. Orderinchaos 01:02, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh and re the LM MfD - essentially WP Australia is reorganising some of its own subprojects over the next 12 months, there used to be less controls on creating them than there is today. Some have inadequate scope to survive meaningfully and the articles in their scopes suffer as a result as others incorrectly assume the project is looking after them - I recently upgraded all the LM articles and was stunned how many were missing or unmaintained. Any maintenance going on had little or nothing to do with the project. Integrating it into WP:NSW meant we could approach it as a broader challenge. Orderinchaos 01:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

WP Australia allows considerable autonomy for each project. Currently none of the projects have task forces, mainly due to size issues - i.e. the same 5 editors working on Hunter region articles may well be also working on the rest of NSW as well, so it doesn't make sense to split purposes - but when/if the projects grow then that is the preferred way for them to grow. Orderinchaos 01:24, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

LOL! Sounds like a plan. As for me, I've got to head off to university now and give a presentation on gender issues in education. Fun stuff. (Out of raw curiosity, this is about gender disadvantage in education, being given by me, a male, to a class of whom 85% are female!) Orderinchaos 01:31, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't aware of the current discussion going on in that regard. I simply made that comment with the belief that you weren't aware of undeletion facilities (which must have been a bit undermining, so I apologise). Dihydrogen Monoxide (H₂O) 06:53, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Have you noticed in the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Inactive projects the discussion of User:SatyrTN's proposal for a new WPfD? I know you are interested in the subject and wanted to make sure you saw what we're talking about. I'm also glad to see that I'm not the only one who supports userfication over deletion of one person projects.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 23:43, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the invite/head's up : )

Responded there. - jc37 04:42, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Doug,

Would you be interested in trying to make your (proposed) WikiProject becoming a succes by actively involving yourself in a recruitment agency aimed at establishing an active base of participants for a WikiProject?--Daanschr 10:31, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

BTW, I really like the way you do User talk posts, this works great. Also, I left a comment at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Inactive projects for you.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 02:03, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm a fan of unified discussion : ) - Though I moved the discussion to the MfD talk page for transparency.

And as for WPC/IP, thanks for the note, I'll comment there. - jc37 02:22, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I've completed the merge and left a note at Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thanks you for participating and helping with the process. If you need anything else on this, please talk page me. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:11, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

The history merge feature maintains attribution of prior edits in the final document. Depending on the type of content being merged, it is favorable for maintaining attribution, without it anyone researching for attribution of items would need to read through edit histories, then find other pages, and go through their edit histories. On more then one occasion the R from Merge copy/paste method has ended up with other editors editing the redirect on the old page, creating forks that have to be merged again. History merge is admin-only as reversing it is very time consuming. We don't widely advertise it for beansy reasons. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:19, 28 September 2007 (UTC)